Showing posts with label compiler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label compiler. Show all posts

Friday, June 8, 2012

Computer code -- is poetry?

Dubliner Eavan Boland is a master poet (and one of my favorites); Ireland shares her with the creative writing program at Stanford University.  In Against Love Poetry (Norton, 2001), we find Boland's tribute to the also-amazing master of language, Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1988).

                     Code          by Eavan Boland

             An Ode to Grace Murray Hopper  1906-88
    maker of a computer compiler and verifier of COBOL 

   Poet to poet.  I imagine you
     at the edge of language, at the start of summer
       in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, writing code.
         You have no sense of time.  No sense of minutes even.
           They cannot reach inside your world,
             your gray work station
               with when yet now never and once.
                 You have missed the other seven.
                   This is the eight day of Creation.