Code as haiku

Response to: http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/but-it-doesnt-mean-anything.html


"Code" is a horrible word.

I prefer "source documents", or, if pressed, "Formal descriptions of the program".

Using the word "code" implies that the document is "encoded" somehow, which is plainly undesirable and wrong.

With some notable (*) exceptions, the primary consumer of a "source document" is a human being, not a machine.

The machine's purpose is to ensure the formal validity and correctness of the document - but the majority of the informational content of the document (variable names, structure, comments) is exclusively directed to human developers.

We will never program in a "wild" natural language, but many programming languages (**) make a deliberate effort to support expressions which simulate or approximate natural language usage, albeit restricted to a particular idiomatic form.

There will always be a tension between keeping a formal language simple enough to reason about and permitting free, naturalistic expression - but this is the same tension that makes poetry and haiku so appealing as an art form.

So many source documents appear to be "in code", not because this is a necessary part of programming, but because it is very very difficult to write things which combine sufficient simplicity for easy understanding, and the correct representation of a difficult and complex problem. In most of these cases, clear understanding is baffled more by the complexity of the real world than by the nature of the programming language itself.

The rigidly deterministic nature of the computer forces the programmer to deal with a myriad of inconsistencies and complications that the non-programmer is able to elide or gloss over with linguistic and social gymnastics. The computer forces us to confront these complications, and to account for them. Legal drafting faces similar (albeit less extreme) challenges.

In the same way that Mathematics isn't really about numbers, but about the skill and craftsmanship of disciplined thought, programming isn't really about computers, but about what happens when you can no longer ignore the details within which the devil resides.

(*) Assembler & anything involving regular expressions.
(**) Python