Shall I Compare Thee to a Line of Code
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NDC London 201662 / 133
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:08
Hey, everyone. How's it going? I'm Lauren Scott. Welcome to my talk. I can see that you're all clearly excellent, nerdy people for choosing the poetry talk. Thank you for coming to it, and I'm really pumped.
00:23
Oh, quick note. Don't forget, after we're done, at the doors, there are the little slips to vote on how you like the talk, green, yellow, and red. Don't forget to put them in. I should totally put in green, but, you know, whatever. All right. As I said before... Oh, and... Well, I'm Lauren Scott.
00:43
I'm from Chicago, Illinois, in the States. I'm a developer at Brad's Deals, a community organizer. I run RailsBridge in Chicago. And... Excuse me. All right. This is going to happen a lot today. Okay. I got really sick yesterday. I came down with a horrible cough.
01:06
So... I did... I swigged a bunch of cough syrup right before we started. I'm hoping this is going to make it a more interesting talk. I'm going to try as hard as I can not to cough, and you're just going to need to bear with me. Thank you. All right. So... I'm a developer, and I'm also a poet.
01:24
For those of you who are from the UK, you can see this picture. It's actually... This was taken in Wales. I'm reading Dylan Thomas's Fern Hill, at Fern Hill. Super exciting. You know. But I... So I left home when I was 15 to go to a boarding school
01:43
for creative writing, and I've had about eight formal years of instruction total. I absolutely love it. I have studied poetry for so much of my life. I got my BA in creative writing with a focus in poetry. But I discovered something after I graduated,
02:02
which I don't know how I didn't realize it before. So poet isn't like a career. It's not a job. People don't actually really pay you to write poetry. So I had to find something else. Actually, if we really want to talk about how much you don't get paid for poetry, this is pretty fun.
02:21
So I was looking for numbers, like exact numbers about this online. And the best that I could find were in 2010. So the best-selling book of poetry in the United States was a book by Stephen Dunn, excuse me. And based off of, you know, what we can kind of guess
02:41
his rate of getting paid for selling the books is. So it sold about like, I think, 18,000 copies or something. Best-selling book of poetry in the US. It made them $44,000. And the second best-selling book of poetry in the US made an estimated $4,000.
03:02
So second best-selling book of poetry, you're like second best at your game, and you're making $4,000 a year off of this. So again, not a career, not really. So programming was a really good next step for me because I found that it was really good for people who are both logical and creative.
03:23
And unlike poems, people actually pay you for writing code. So before we get started a little bit more, I would like to just ask y'all some questions. So, whoa, whoa, whoa, trying to find my little mouse. There we go.
03:41
How many of you have read any poetry? Show of hands. Okay, that's like, wow, surprisingly, not everybody raised their hands and like, I'm kind of doubting you. I bet you've read some poetry. How many of you would say that you like poetry? Oh my God, okay, this is gonna be fun.
04:01
How many of you have read poetry outside of a mandatory like English class or writing class? Okay, so wow, that's a surprising amount of you, especially given how many of you, those of you who just raised your hands did not raise your hand for liking poetry. Impressive.
04:20
And how many of you have written poetry? Oh my gosh. All right, we're gonna have a ball with you guys. You've got a lot to learn. Okay, we're gonna start off by talking a little bit about sort of the basic terminology that we're gonna use for poetry. So we're gonna do a poetry rundown. I'm gonna put a poem up on the screen. First, I'm just gonna read it
04:40
so y'all don't have to just read it over my shoulder. It's called The Poem by George Oppen. A poetry of the meaning of words and a bond with the universe. I think there is no light in the world but the world and I think there is light.
05:00
So nice poem, real short. Let's talk a little bit about what's inside of it, what makes it up. All right, so first we've got the line. So the line is, as you can see, the beginning to the end. It is not a sentence. While the sentence is sort of like the building block of prose, the line is a building block of poetry.
05:23
And then there's the line break. So the line break, you can kind of think of it as like a BR tag, right? The line break is, excuse me, where we've sort of decided that we're going to stop with one line and move on to the next one. Then we have the stanza.
05:42
So the stanza you can almost think of as like your P tag, right? Because it is a lot like a paragraph, like what a paragraph is to a novel or a short story. A stanza is the poetry. So it's sort of just separating little bits of thought.
06:03
Now there are two kind of main kinds of poetry where this is like one way that you can kind of split poetry up. And all poetry is going to fit into one of these two categories. There are form poems and then there's free verse. So form poems, they have like a set structure.
06:20
They have a set pattern. So, you know, like sonnet, limerick, haiku, these are all form poems that we know. There are tons more. There are sestinas and pantoums and all kinds of stuff. But they have a structure that you have to follow. Sometimes these have rhyme schemes and sometimes they don't.
06:41
Like we all know limericks, right? Limericks have definite rhyme schemes, but like a haiku. Your haiku shouldn't rhyme? It can, but it doesn't have to. And then there's free verse. So free verse essentially just means like not a form poem.
07:01
And most of the poetry that's written today is in free verse. Like not a lot of people really write form poetry anymore. That's not to say it's rare, but the majority of poetry out there is going to be free verse. Free verse has no constraints and it has no rhymes like you have to have in there,
07:23
but that's not saying that it's not going to have any rhymes at all. So like there can still be like a ton of attention to sound and the way that the sounds sound together, which, you know, rhyme is a part of,
07:42
where the meter, et cetera, a lot of the things that are set in form poetry are still like present in the mind of somebody writing free verse, but they don't have to follow a pattern. And so actually these constraints that are in form poetry,
08:03
they originated too for like really good reasons. When we think about sort of the history of poetry, these are coming from a time where literary knowledge was all sort of part of oral history, right?
08:21
So in order for things to survive, in order for people to know them and for them to be sort of spread around, they had to be easily memorized. They had to be able like, cause people weren't necessarily writing them down. They didn't necessarily read or write. There weren't printing presses. People had to figure out, okay, how do we make it
08:42
so that like I can teach this person this poem and they're going to be able to sort of help the poem live on. And rhyme and meter and all of these other things, these were great structures to help people memorize. So they're memorization tactics really.
09:01
And if you think about like music, so I mean, music has patterns and things that help us sort of recognize and remember songs. So if you think about verses and choruses, rhyming lyrics, there's a repetition of melodies within songs or like time signatures.
09:21
Music without time signatures, a lot less easy for people to be able to pick up. These things are there to help us remember them, but they also kind of make them catchy, you know? Just the same as paying attention to these things in free verse poetry, like really can help you shape the way
09:40
that people are reading your poems. And it's not all stuffy as you think. So a lot of people might think, okay, poetry is antiquated, it isn't useful. It's not descriptive of like us and our zeitgeist and like who we are. It's just a relic of the past,
10:00
which totally makes sense for people to think. The way that poetry is taught in most schools, a lot of it is really old stuffy poetry. I like to think of, like I call it like bluebird poetry where it's like about the bluebirds and things. And like, I think that's really boring. I can't stand that stuff. And so when that's all the people hear,
10:24
it's very easy to think like, I don't know. I don't know if that's for me. But there's a lot more out there. I'm gonna kick us off by just reading a short poem by Dennis Johnson called Heat that, I mean, it's not even that modern.
10:40
It's just from, I think this is from the 70s, but it's a good one to show that it isn't as stuffy as a lot of our preconceived notions are. Heat. Here in the electric dusk, your naked lover tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.
11:04
It's beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin. Our lady of wet glass rings on the album cover, streaming with hatred in the heat as the record falls and the snake band chords begin to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones
11:23
and such a last light full of spheres and zones. August, you're just an erotic hallucination, just so much feverishly produced kazoo music. Are you serious? This large oven impersonating night,
11:41
this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion, the bogus moon of tenderness and magic you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light. So like no bluebirds in that one, you know? And if you still think that that's stuffy,
12:01
like there is also some poetry out there for you. Gets a lot crazier than that. All right, so what about programming? It's why you're all here. Let's talk about that a little bit. So you might have already noticed kind of the biggest connection between the two.
12:21
The most obvious thing, language, right? So both poetry and programming, they're ways of creating meaning from language. You can think of language as the creative medium, right? And when I say creative, I don't necessarily mean like creative, like how a poem is, how a song is,
12:43
when you think about like ooh, creativity. I'm talking about just the act of creating something new, right? So we're using our medium, just language in this case, to make something that serves a certain purpose.
13:00
Whether that purpose is something tangible, like I'm making an app where you can order pizza for delivery, or intangible, like I'm gonna write a poem that conveys the devastation of losing your parents. That's sort of irrelevant in this context. So either way, we're attempting to address our purpose in language.
13:23
And of course, if we're using language, that means that we're gonna have to deal with syntax. So there's this Oscar Wilde quote, I've spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out. Which I'm sure a lot of you can relate to, right?
13:43
So syntax is a big part of programming, and poets also have to be really keenly attuned to it. Because both of these uses of syntax, they require this really enormous attention to detail to make sure that something that's as small as one piece of punctuation
14:02
is like that's the exact right thing to use at the moment. So I think a good example is like the Oxford comma. So if you don't know what the Oxford comma is, it's like that last comma before the and in a list of things. So you can see this list.
14:21
We invited the rhinoceri, Washington and Lincoln. But without the Oxford comma, it can be read as we invited the rhinoceri, Washington and Lincoln, which is a very, very different thing to say. So I mean, this example is just talking about an actual grammatical rule, right?
14:43
And in poetry, you don't have to be grammatically correct. So it's the way that you put your sentence together and the way that you use syntax means something. And every decision that you make regarding that syntax,
15:02
it changes the reader's impression of your poem. So like if you don't want the poem's voice to be formal or authoritative, for example, like you might issue a capital letters or excessive punctuation. If you do like a run on sentence that can kind of create a feeling of like urgency
15:23
or anxiety in your poem, so really it becomes another means of expression is when we choose to use and when we choose to break the rules that are surrounding us.
15:41
So the next similarity would be white space. White space is a negative space around your words, space that kind of forms around them. I guess actually in the example of the slide, this would be like black space since we've got a black background and white words. But it can have a really profound effect on your poetry
16:02
because having the same words with the different space around them, it can mean different things. So like, you know one of the first things you learn as a programmer, you learn like to properly indent things so that other people can understand your code, right? Like especially people who,
16:20
and a lot of people do sort of like, you start coding with HTML and CSS just to try it out. You're like, I want to see if I can do something with a computer. And that's like a huge part of learning how to do that. It's just being like, okay, how do I like indent these things to show nesting? How do I make this understandable when other people look at it?
16:42
So like, and in some languages that indentation too, that's the key to not just other developers being able to read your code, but the key to the computer being able to read your code, right? And so in both fields, you sort of get trained, you get like this, you have this gut response
17:02
to how the white space in your code works. And that's like why we can use it as a tool to help others understand our code. So like, if we look at this, oh, pardon. So, I mean, this looks like chaos, right?
17:22
If, excuse me, if you've ever worked with beginners, you've probably seen this at some point. And if a beginner was working on this and they asked for help, it would take me so much longer to help her because the lack of white space completely obscures what she's trying to say. So, I mean, what if we took away all the white space?
17:42
It's like reading minified HTML or JavaScript or what have you, and that stuff is impossible to read. Like, the white space absolutely helps us and it helps us get a feel for like what's good and what's bad kind of right away.
18:01
So one of the first similarities that I noticed when I was writing, like when I was starting to write code it's how code also visually mirrors poetry a lot on the page. So here I've got some of the Rails source code on the left and on the right is a poem by Sylvia Plath.
18:23
And so I blurred them both out so you're not gonna be reading them, but if you just take a look at sort of like how they look and how that white space is working for all of them, like the stanzas look a lot like the methods, right? And they're separated from each other
18:41
to separate thought, just like in the methods. And then also like if you want to think more about how white space can change a perception of the poem. So the Sylvia Plath poem looks like it's a little bit more subdued, controlled.
19:07
Look at this E.E. Cummings poem. So this one does not look like the same poem, just without reading any of it, just looking at the shape of it on the page. Like, we get a very different feel from the white space.
19:23
And it feels a little bit more free and like a little bit more energetic and less constrained. And without reading it, you can really see the difference between these two pieces.
19:40
So in both of these forms, poetry and code, you have something that you're trying to communicate with the reader through language, right? And that reader can be a human reader or the reader can even be a computer, right? So a poem kind of has an expected output, just like a program does. So it aims for something, if that's conveying an emotion
20:02
or an idea or giving the reader a feeling. So you can kind of think of a poem actually as a program. So the reader enters this poem gram, poem program, and we expect it to change them, right? It's like a destructive method.
20:20
The reader should come into the poem one way and leave the poem another way. Of course, the difficult part of this is testing, right? You can't objectively test these things. It has to be a lot of user testing and the results are going to be very different
20:40
a lot of the time. We'll get into that later. But yeah, in both of these forms, you're trying to say, you're trying to say the most and do the most with the least amount of words. So you're striving for brevity. And it's all sort of about creativity within constraints.
21:05
When you come down to it, they're both really, really constrained in many ways. But you try and use that to make it better. So one of the biggest types of constraints in poetry is when you choose to use it, that's form poetry.
21:20
And we talked a little bit about it earlier. We're gonna talk some more about it right now. So, okay, we're gonna talk a bit about sonnets. We're gonna go through what are the constraints of a sonnet. And for any of you lit nerds out there, I'm talking about Elizabethan sonnets, not Petrarchan sonnets, they are different.
21:42
Elizabethan sonnets are also called Shakespearean sonnets. And they're slightly different from Petrarchan or Italian sonnets. Woo. Okay, what makes a sonnet a sonnet? So, very first thing. Sonnets are 14 lines long. All right, easy, done.
22:01
Sonnets are made, excuse me, are made out of three quatrains. And quatrains are four-lined stanzas. You guys remember stanzas? Yeah, the thing separated. So we have four-lined stanzas. We've got three of them. And then, something happens called the volta. And the volta is a logical term.
22:23
So this isn't like a physical thing that's in the poem, but it's sort of like a structural thing that happens at this physical point in the poem. So usually those three quatrains that you're starting with are kind of building towards a certain argument.
22:42
A lot of the sonnet is sort of based on rhetoric, right? So you're building up an argument, and then you get to the volta, and you do something that kind of twists that argument and leads towards something else, which brings us to the couplet at the end.
23:00
So it ends with one couplet. A couplet is a two-lined stanza. And all of these are written in iambic pentameter. What is iambic pentameter, you might ask? Great question. So I guarantee you, you have heard a lot of iambic pentameter in your life.
23:21
Iambic pentameter is a term from prosody. Prosody is a study of meter in your poetry. So what that means is like, the way the poem sounds with the rhythms. So saying like, the way the rhythms sound. Da-da, da-da-da-da. Kind of breaking that down and studying it,
23:42
that's the study of prosody. And iambic pentameter means, well, iambic means that there are, so there are these things called metrical feet, which is basically like a little unit of rhythm. And all these lines and sentences and stuff, they're made up of little units of rhythm.
24:01
And iamb goes da-dum. And pentameter just means like, there are five of them in the meter, right? So it's going to be da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum. It's actually really common in English, just in the way that we speak. I will find often that like, I recognize,
24:21
I'm like, oh, that sentence I just said was an iambic pentameter. But I think a really good example of this is, you know, but soft, what light through yonder window breaks? Or, you know, if music be the food of love, play on. All of that, like Shakespeare wrote a ton of it, right?
24:40
There are many examples, but you can kind of hear that meter. So then you have the rhyme scheme. In this case, in Elizabethan sonnets, it goes a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g. And basically what that means is, you know,
25:01
the lines that end in a gonna rhyme with the other lines that end in a. Or I guess line, right? The line that ends in b is gonna rhyme with the other line that ends in b. So on and so forth. You can see that at the end, they rhyme. And so I've taken the end words from the sonnet that we're about to look at.
25:21
You can see like sun red, done head, white cheeks, delight breaks. Kind of get a feel for it. So all right, we're gonna go through, we're gonna do kind of a bluebird poem, sorry y'all. We're gonna go to a classic sonnet.
25:40
Shakespeare isn't known for writing the best sonnets, actually, he wasn't particularly good at it. But I think that they're very good examples of iambic pentameter. And this next one's kind of fun. Oh, by the way, speaking of sonnets, that poem that we read earlier, Heat by Dennis Johnson, totally a sonnet.
26:02
You'll notice that it's broken some of the rules of what sonnets are supposed to be, but it does retain a lot of different parts of what makes a sonnet a sonnet. Anyway, all right, let's read some Shakespeare. Oh, and pay attention to the logical progression of the poem and keep your eyes out for that Volta.
26:24
Shakespeare's Sonnet Number 130. My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun. Coral is far more red than her lips red. If snow be white, why then her breasts are done. If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head.
26:43
I have seen roses the mask red and white, but no such roses see eye in her cheeks. And in some perfumes is there more delight than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet, well, I know that music hath a far more pleasing sound.
27:03
I grant I never saw a goddess go. My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare as any she belied with false compare. So you can see how this form
27:21
is sort of working for him here, right? So in the first three stanzas, he's talking a lot about how his mistress isn't perfect in this way that you're like, whoa, dude. Like, let's say a real posse to say that about your girlfriend. But what he's doing here is he's sort of riffing
27:42
on these flowery love poems that were really popular and like he wrote them too. Everybody kind of wrote them. And he's sort of making fun of them here in a way, right? So it's all about like, oh, the way that the lover was idolized,
28:00
because normally, you know, you can think about it like, oh, and her hair was golden like the sun and she walked with the, you know, with the, this is me frolicking like a goddess. So you think that all of these women are like totally perfect and you're like, yeah, these are just being written about people.
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These people shouldn't always be like, we shouldn't have to be like, she is literally the most beautiful woman who ever lived and she's made out of God dust and everything about her is fabulous. Like, that's not gonna be true. And he's saying like, not like, she's got a lot of problems.
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But then for the Volta, he kind of flips it around and he's like, okay, but here's the thing. I think that loving her, even though she's got these problems, is like way more honest than sort of like
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making this idealized version of her and professing my love to that. Which is like kind of sweet and then also kind of like, Shakespeare, you're negging her, like this is, come on, this is like pick up artist stuff. But, at any rate, I think it works
29:22
in the context of this poem. And okay, so you can see like a lot went into this, because I mean, he had to put in all of those constraints that we talked about, which is like crazy. It is like crazy how much stuff has to go into that. And it's gotta be good, right?
29:41
Like, it is really, really hard to fit what you're trying to say into this form. And like if you think that's hard, a sonnet is like easy, right? Sonnet is like, okay, that's one of the forms you learn in like your first writing class in college and you're like, yeah, I'm gonna like write this really cool form poem and it's great and they're wonderful.
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But like, there are crazy forms out there. And just surrounding sonnets in general, there's actually a form called the heroic crown of sonnets. And that's, okay, it's composed of 15 sonnets
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in one poem, right? So the poem is 15 whole sonnets and the last sonnet is the first lines of the first 14 sonnets in the order that they came in the poem. So like, how do you write that?
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How does that ever make sense? And it can be like so frustrating when you're trying to write this and trying to make it work. And it can be easy to like hate the form for keeping you back and just be like, whatever, it's gonna do me.
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But there's a reason. There's a reason why these forms exist. So sort of like what I was talking about with the way that they aided in memorization. So it's not just the memorization. I mean, these things were developed
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and they have stuck around because they give very helpful guidelines to set you up with a structure that works, right? So forms help you do a lot of things. They help you organize your thought, pay attention to sound, develop patterns and rhythms.
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Sometimes they can just help you get started when you don't know what to write. And they can do a lot more. And each form out there is gonna bring a totally different set of tools to the table and these are gonna help you do all kinds of different things with your poem.
32:01
So the forms are there to help. And challenges are fun, right? So when I first started writing form poetry, I got really, really excited. And all right, so like, yeah, okay, everybody uses this meme and whatnot. But I did sonnet all the things.
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Like I sonneted all the things, like too many things. I mean, you guys, I wrote my college entrance essays in iambic pentameter and quatrains with endrime. Like I got very, very pumped about it. And part of that was because I was like, yeah, like everything is a puzzle.
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And it's, as programmers, we know like, that can be really addictive, right? Thinking of things as puzzles. Okay, I'm sticking in here. Yes. Because there's that satisfying feeling
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when you get the puzzle completed and you're like, yes, I fit the thing in there. Like it works. But it's one of those things where, you know, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, people say. And you can start putting things into these forms
33:23
that don't belong in their forms. Like I wrote a lot of things into sonnets that should not have been sonnets. They did not have the kind of rhetorical structure that is benefited by a sonnet. They didn't have, there was just no reason
33:43
for them to take that form. It's like really easy to get caught up in those low level challenges. Like, okay, yeah, I'm gonna take this thought, I'm gonna make it fit the meter, I'm gonna make it fit the rhyme scheme. And you forget those sort of high level challenges. Like asking yourself, should I be using this form?
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And does it help this particular poem or idea? Okay, this probably sounds pretty familiar to a bunch of you by now, right? Form poetry is really, really similar to a lot of our tools in programming. So, frameworks, languages,
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design patterns, ABA, BMBC. So, like form poetry, I mean, these are things that we have created to give ourselves helpful guidelines. We wanna make our code easier to write. But like, I'm sure every one of us has had times
34:43
where we are struggling against the form that we've chosen to write on. So, you might be tempted to like change a lot of things, like a lot of those low level things, trying to get your thing to fit this form,
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to fit the form that you chose, that you end up losing a lot of the positive things that the form was supposed to provide for you. So you have to ask yourself, is your form the right form? And it's like totally okay to break conventions sometimes.
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And you don't have to follow every last rule strictly. But if you find that you want to change everything, particularly like not just low level things, but like kind of high level thought structures of the poem or like things that the language
35:42
or the framework is particularly good at, you can say like, what good is that form doing you? Would a different form be better? I mean, like recently, so like recently at work, I was pairing with somebody who got very, very excited
36:00
about some certain concepts that he had been reading about in Clojure. We're working on a Ruby project and he starts trying to really apply those to the Ruby project. And it was really difficult. Like we're kind of, you know, it was one of those days where you're pairing and you're kind of almost starting to argue together a little bit and you're trying to kind of figure out like, okay, how are we gonna make this work?
36:25
And there's this real struggle because we're trying to fit these very non Ruby-like things into our Rails application. And then the end, we kind of had to accept like, okay, so if we're using Ruby, like let's do Ruby,
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let's do what Ruby does. If we feel that we have a need for this other thing, then that would be a time for us to consider switching frameworks, switching languages. Saying like, okay, is this a project that could be done better in that other language?
37:01
Or do we, I mean, do we just like, do we give in to the Ruby or do we change everything up? We gave in to the Ruby. It was the right thing to do though. But yeah, like when you notice yourself making those changes,
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you really have to start asking these questions and you have to trust yourself to know the, like you have to trust yourself to make changes and to be able to deviate from the form, but you have to be able to recognize where your limits are.
37:41
So if you get yourself into a routine of asking, why am I using this form? It can be really helpful. Hold on one second. Oh my God, what time is it?
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Does anyone know? Yeah, cool, all right. So then what? Thank you, I don't have, I don't have a clock. Oh my God, there's a clock right there. You are brilliant, ma'am, thank you. Okay, all right, so then, oh no, is my little gif not, oh no, my data.
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You guys, the data's shrugging there and he's doing it in a really funny way and you can't tell. I promise you it's amazing. All right, well then what? So you pick your form or you go free verse or you pick a language, you pick a framework and you get to writing, but then what makes code and poetry good, right?
38:43
So you and your coworkers might debate about the best way to code something and we all know that there are like a million opinions about everything program related on the internet, right? When it comes down to it, it is really hard to teach something that is going to change so much based off of the context.
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If that context is the line or the context writing a line in the poem or like the controller in your application, maybe that's the context. Like, but we have these guidelines. We have guidelines in both fields and they help us along the way. And one of the main guidelines that applies to both,
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oh, sorry. Say a lot with a little. I told you we'd get back to this. Okay, so in both fields, people love it when things are concise. So you want to use just enough language to make yourself clear. No more, no less. So one thing that I ask myself a lot when I'm writing a poem is,
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okay, is this word necessary to the poem? Is this line necessary? Will I lose something if I take it out? And what have I gained by putting it in? So that's a really good question, right? But we have to decide first what we mean by necessary. So I like to define it kind of as a balance
40:02
of two factors. There's fact and beauty. Let's dive into those a little bit more. All right, so fact. By fact, I mean like the functionality of your code or like the message or narrative, so to speak,
40:21
of your poetry, not to say that your poem has to have like a narrative or a plot. Like the main thing is that you're trying to get across to your reader. So it's what you say. And then there's beauty. So beauty in terms of your code, I'm talking about like the readability and the human consumption friendliness of your code
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and the imagery or like the poem-y bits of your poem. So I'm making the assumption here that readable code is something that you're striving for, which might not be the case for everybody. But if that's not the case for you, just pretend like it is for now.
41:04
But yeah, the beauty is like how you say things. So we're gonna take a look at a poem that is really famous for saying a lot with a little. In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound. The apparition of these faces in the crowd
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pedals on a wet black bow. So Pound is able to convey a huge amount of feeling in just two lines. This poem, like everybody cannot get enough of this poem. Like English majors everywhere, like I'm getting a tattoo of pedals on a wet black bow.
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Like literally I have several friends who have told me that they're doing that. So like people love this. They go nuts over it. And part of the reason why is it's really well balanced. It is so concise, but it says exactly what it needs to say. It gets its point across. And even like, all of you when you're hearing it,
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you might not necessarily get the same message out of it. Like some of you might be like, oh, it's clearly about this. And some of you might think, well, I think maybe it's about that. And you know, that's fine. But it's totally okay to have different interpretations of this. But like, I think most people can agree,
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you kind of get something out of that. You read that and you're like, yeah, it is like pedals on a wet black bow. All right, so let's talk about that balance. So the balance is important, why? Well, without beauty, fact can be irrelevant. So a poem that tells you like just what it's about
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with no embellishment, no poem-y bits. So it might be clear, but it totally loses its magic, right? Just like a convoluted line of code. Like you've got to like change 15 methods long on one line and you're like, this is amazing and beautiful. And like, I've written this in the most like elegant way
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that I can, elegant for the computer maybe. But if somebody is looking at that, it like, it can not just be difficult for them to read. It can be like painful, much like bad poetry. So, okay, speaking of bad poetry, what if Pound had gone too far in stripping down the essence of his poem?
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Well, here we go. I was in the metro by Ezra, just the facts Pound. I saw faces in the crowd, they were beautiful. Okay, not particularly like a beautiful poem, but it's also losing a lot of that meaning
43:41
that it had before, right? So we don't get that sort of full richness of the poem. We don't get those extra things that were conveyed in the beauty of its imagery. So you can think of imagery and metaphor kind of like variables or methods. You're referencing one thing,
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and by doing so you have access to all of this other information. And so like by itself, I mean, a method might not tell that much of a story, but in the context of your code, it makes sense. It comes alive. But if we do too much elaboration,
44:20
it can lose focus. So if you go on and on with your imagery and flowery words, you are totally diluting the message that your poem has. And just like, sometimes we break things up too much in the name of readability, or we add unnecessary comments. You know, we end up cluttering our code,
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cluttering our message. So if Pound hadn't only said what he needed to, it could have ended up like this. In a dreary station of the metro by Ezra, pilot on Pound. I was deep down in the metro looking at the crowd and these faces appeared almost as if they were ghosts.
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The metro was a dark cavern, the crowd a solid mass, but the faces were clear, delicate, fleeting, a brief moment of beauty in the otherwise dark world, like flower petals stuck to a slick black bow, wet with rain.
45:21
Okay, way less impactful. Poetry also totally follows the rule of dry, you know, don't repeat yourself. You say it once, you say it well, and you don't need to say it again. And you use the methods and the variables available to you. And also, once you establish a method or variable,
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like you don't, unless it changes, you don't need to rewrite the darn thing. You're able to reference it, right? So like Pound didn't have to go on and on about how he felt when he saw those faces in the crowd. He just called, okay, you guys, literally what I have in my notes here
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is he called on the included library of human experience. My apologies for that. And told us it was like petals on a wet black bow, which held the rest of the information that we needed. Awesome, right? So you gotta remember the human aspect. So ultimately, if you work with other developers,
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your code isn't just meant to be consumed by the computer, right? So it's meant to be consumed by other people. And by foregoing readability, you cut other people out of the equation. So you're not writing poems, you're just journaling. Oh, burn.
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So maybe try approaching your code with that question that I asked myself about my poetry. Is each word necessary? And is there anything that's not being said? I'd remember that readability can be just as necessary as function. Okay, so all that being said,
47:02
how do we teach the contextual? How do we learn the contextual? I mean, a lot of these guidelines that we're talking about, guidelines, they are fairly dependent on making gut decisions. And it can be so hard to teach people how to make the best decisions based off of their contexts,
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or even to agree what the best decision is when you know the context. And from this, I think there's a lot that we can learn from the way the poetry is taught. Let's talk about workshops.
47:41
So the vast, vast majority of a poet or writer's education is spent in writing workshops. So if you don't know what a workshop is, a writing workshop, so like in a college program, you're gonna take at least one of these at all times. They usually have like, I don't know, around like eight people, like a small number of students.
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And they rely really, really heavily on giving feedback to each other. So when it's your turn to be workshopped, and this is like, this is so terrifying. You give your poem or like poems to the class,
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and they take them home, usually for a whole week. And they spend a lot of that week, if they do their homework, reading that poem and marking it up all over the front, and then usually writing, like if they're not a very good student, they'll write like a one line
48:41
of feedback afterwards. If they're diligent, they might fill up the entire back of the page of your poem, and then maybe some more room to all just the feedback that they have about your poems. And then you reconvene the next week, and you read your poem out loud to the class,
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and then everyone discusses it. This is where it gets really terrifying. So for the first part of the discussion, you are not allowed to talk. And by the first part, I mean usually it's almost the entire discussion. So you have to sit there completely silent while your classmates all critique your poem,
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they talk about what it means. You are not allowed to jump in. You can't defend anything or explain anything or answer any questions. And like they get it really wrong a lot of the time. It is very hard to stay quiet. Like they might all decide that your poem
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is about something that you did not intend for it to even remotely be about. And they spend like half an hour all talking about how successfully it conveys that idea. And you're like, oh my God, I have to say something. And you can't, you can't say anything at all. Yeah, it's really hard.
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But by not being able to reply, you are given a gift. And that gift is you know what your poem says when it speaks for itself. Because you will not always be there. When your poem is out in a literary journal or a book,
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or when you submit it to a literary journal or a publisher, you will not be there to defend it. When somebody is reading your poem in one of those, they cannot get that missing piece of information where you could be like, well actually, it kind of like was supposed to be about this. And they're like, oh, I totally get it.
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No, you don't get to have that conversation with them. And so even if you don't agree with the critique that people give to your poetry, which again, often you will really not agree with it, even if they totally kind of got what it was supposed to be about, you might just not think that they're right.
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But you get this really valuable information, right? And that information is how people react to your work as it stands by itself, not as it stands explained by you. So with programming, like, okay, a bug might come up in code that you wrote.
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Maybe you are sick that day. Maybe you're on vacation. Maybe you moved to a different job. Maybe you're a consultant and you left that code with a product shop and now they have it and they do a get blame on it. And they're like, who wrote this? What is happening? You're like, oh, cool.
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It was that consultant that I will never see again and I can't ask any questions. Raise your hand if you have had to work on somebody else's code like this when they have not been around. Yeah, right, it sucks. It's horrible and you're just like, oh my God, I just want answers and you can't get answers.
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Or even like, even maybe you wrote the code and you cannot remember what was happening when you wrote it because there have definitely been things that I've written where I will come back to it later. I'll get blame and I'll be like, what fool wrote this? And I'm like, oh, crap, it was me. You have to try and remember.
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You're like, okay, what was happening? What was going on? I know there was a reason I did it this way but I have no idea why. So you can't rely on you or anyone else being there to explain the code.
52:44
So in order to write better code, in order to write code that helps the programmers around us, try being silent. And what I'm suggesting here is very difficult. It is even really difficult for me.
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Excuse me. I wish my lungs would try being silent. I'd be really into that. So I find myself wanting to explain my decisions all the time. And I think a lot of that comes out of this fear
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that someone, I'm like, oh, someone's gonna misunderstand me and think that I don't know these things that I know. So I have to justify it. But okay, if your code isn't speaking for itself, it is so valuable for you to stay silent and to listen and to see if the way that you're writing it
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is unclear to the people around you. You can explain yourself later and often you will need to because there are things that do explain and justify the way you wrote that, right? But allow yourself a moment to get that raw feedback
54:00
and you might, excuse me, end up hearing actionable pieces of information that you wouldn't have heard otherwise. So if you wanna do this afterwards, how can you implement this sort of practice in your own life? So a lot of you might already do some kind of code reviews, right?
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So at your work, you can always talk to people about doing kind of workshop style code reviews where people kind of come up with notes. You sit down just like in a writing workshop and people talk about it and you can't talk until everybody has kind of agreed like, yeah, okay, we're done talking about this. No, you can say what you need to.
54:43
If you already have code reviews or do something where you submit pull requests and maybe people make comments on those pull requests, you can try and stay silent until you've gotten sort of the full feedback
55:00
and not kind of respond immediately. If you do this, of course, I would suggest discussing it with the people you work with first so they don't think that you've just gone completely unresponsive. You know, just a disclaimer. Doing a weekly lunch and learn with your team, workshop style.
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Somebody can submit a piece of code they've written, have other people look over it and it doesn't have to be work-related and do sort of a workshop style critique of it or even just doing that with your friends outside of work. Or just sort of make an effort
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to embrace silence personally and even outside of coding. This can just be kind of a good practice to give yourself some time before responding. So after we're done getting all of this feedback, right?
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What do we do with it? And this is some of the hardest, like this is one of the hardest things to do because it's very easy to become overly attached to the things that we make. So one of the hardest things I've had to do as a writer is overcome thinking of my poems as being like precious.
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So like you put a lot of yourself into the creative process, right? And you get proud of what you've accomplished and it can become really difficult to change that thing. So our poems or our code, they can become like our children, right? So we're like, we refuse to think anything
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that they do is remotely like that. It's like, it's all perfect. And we like love and accept them for who they are, which is great with children, but with your work, we have to be a little bit more brutal because when we think this way, this is when our work stagnates.
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So I'm gonna argue, kill what you love. I don't mean always. And I don't mean you have to completely kill all of those things that are precious to you. You don't have to rewrite all of your code. You don't have to rewrite all of your poetry.
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But we need to be ready and willing to destroy things that are precious to us. Because like, okay, you don't know when your feature will be canceled and they'll be like, ah, nevermind, we don't need that anyway.
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Or maybe they use your coworkers implementation. Or maybe somebody just like gives you feedback that you can learn and grow from if you're willing to change what you wrote. And it's hard to do, but you have to remember you are not what you make.
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So the more that you conflate yourself with the things that you produce, the harder it's going to be when you need to change them. So you have to remember that although you put a lot of yourself into what you do, your work is not you. And changing or even destroying your work, that's not a sign of personal defeat.
58:23
So the majority of most of the famous poems out there went through so many revisions, or as we'd say, refactors. And often the earlier drafts look absolutely nothing like the poems that they ended up as. So, I mean, if these poets kept their work precious,
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they never would have achieved all of the things that they did. So as long as we listen to feedback and we are willing to sort of shed our ego and accept that feedback with an open heart, we can learn a lot from the way the poets do their craft.
59:04
Thank you guys all for coming out today. You can find me online as devdame, like everywhere. Does anybody have any questions? Yeah.
59:22
No, I don't. Oh, I love it. Yeah, he was saying that there's a programming language designed to look like Shakespearean grammar. Yeah, there's some really neat kind of,
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kind of, oh, what's the word that I'm looking for? Weird abstract-ish kind of artsy languages out there. There's, is it Piet? I forget how you pronounce it. That's, yeah, it's just programming in blocks of color.
01:00:02
And there's some neat things out there. Actually, oh man, so there's this fantastic book called Code Poems or Code Poetry, it's one of the two, that a few years ago, some people got together and like, they were talking about how code and poetry are similar, and they put out a call, this is before I started
01:00:22
programming and I'm still kind of mad about that cuz I want to be in this book. They put out a call for people to write poems in code and it has to be like functioning code, it has to compile basically. It doesn't have to do anything in particular, but it has to work. Yeah, right, it's, it's, they're amazing.
01:00:41
I, the book is, it's only in bookstores in New York and Barcelona. I think you can order it online from the Barcelona one. I gave this talk in Barcelona earlier this fall and I like went on a pilgrimage to pick up this book. And I actually, okay, I have never felt more nerdy than I felt.
01:01:00
I was like sitting in the park, reading the book, and I actually cried at one of the poems. And I was like, oh wow, that's, that's something. That's to say, they're very good. Highly recommended. Any more questions? All right. Thank you all so much for coming out.
01:01:21
Don't forget to do the vote thing on your way out and have a good one. Thank you. Thank you.