WordPress users might have been surprised to see the blogging platform’s motto “Code is poetry.” This seems a quirky way for WordPress programmers to express their love of the trade. Yet they aren’t the only ones to have made the connection between computer code and poetry. Marjin Haverbeke, author of the programming book “Eloquent JavaScript,” argues that a flexible computer language like JavaScript can, in fact, lend itself to personal expression. As an exercise, a post on his blog even attempts to compute prime numbers in the style of Hunter S. Thompson as opposed to Borges. The notion of programmers lovingly writing poems to computers is quite evocative. When computers start replying back with their own poetry, if it’s any good, perhaps we will have to recognize them as sentient beings.
