Gleaning Reader,
Verbose by no means equates to good, enjoyable, or interesting.
I wrote this close to 1am as an exercise in prose, and if it needed an apology then I wouldn’t post it, so I shall make none.
Some Prose for Those who Suppose that Programmers are not Verbose
Written shortly before a dose.
What is the point in programming? It often strikes me just how temporary a thing programming is, an art form that is gone and forgotten far easier than any other creation I can really think of. It is also such a fast paced thing, a piece of code you write in the morning could be out of date by the end of the day, and that’s if you’re lucky. Imagine an artist at his easel with his paints dulled before he could finish his canvas, or a rhetorician unable to finish his speech, for the practice and customs of his language had changed since he began.
That is the excellent thing about programming, but worse – far worse – for the artist at least has a dulled painting that shall stand the testament of his day spent working upon it. And a man gifted in rhetoric shall have his words remembered and one day enjoyed again. What, then, is the testament of programming?
Has a programmer created something that will stand the test of time? Surely not, the great world of excellent work will quickly turn over and bring up better things and forget what was there before. There is no store cupboard filled with dusty lines of code, no collectors nor museums for bits and bytes. There are no ruins, no ashes, no shards to reflect upon. A great architect may be remembered by the tumbled stones of a mighty abbey, some sculptor recalled in the shattered ashes of ancient Pompeii. The trophies of thousands of lost hours that could be recalled, if one could but reminisce over the delete button.
But then, what is programming? Do we program to create beautiful lines of code to be adored and remembered? Surely not. Programming is the expression of an idea, the creation of a solution. Programming is one of those excellent practices that can help many, that can freely be shared with any, something that is bound only by the hardware it resides in; in a world where hardware is as common as software, or where they may become one and the same thing, information could be entirely free.
Programming, then, may not be a long standing art form, nor one that anyone is likely to care for beyond its useful lifetime, but it is a step to freedom where in the past the cost of materials have blocked access for so many. Hardware may not be free, but programming, the truly important heart behind a million new innovations every day, is free, and by this freedom anyone can create an idea and build one more better thing in the ever turning world, and hopefully make it turn that little more kindly.
That, surely, is reason to program, even if the particular lines of code spent muddling over for hours, the brush strokes of software, are themselves in moments forgotten.