<\/p>\n
Code is Poetry<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I was certainly not thinking of poetry when I clicked on the website\u2019s \u201ceditor\u201d pages that day\u2014on the site\u2019s code, that is. I can\u2019t write code. I can recognize it when I see it, but when the task involves editing code, I\u2019m out of my depth. Only I just wanted to adjust one small thing, just this one time. I had sought out expert advice: just a few lines of code would produce two words of English — \u201cRead More\u201d– after 50 words of a post. I typed the snippet in, very carefully. Exactly<\/em>. Checked it once, and again. And hit return. No. Oh God, no. The screen was white except for one thin, bleak line of text across the top, something about a \u201cparse error\u201d. The site represents a charity that barely survives on gifts of money and time. Suddenly we had no name, no posts, no links, no visible history. \u201cWe\u201d were gone.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I telephoned the hosting company \u2013 no matter that it was 4 am in Arizona. Human suffering takes new forms in the digital age. The telephone queue is a misery our ancestors never knew, for example, a timed sequence of assaults by recorded voice and imposed music over a slow erosion of hope. As I waited, shamed at having so lightly betrayed a gentle trust, one of those relentlessly enthusiastic voices read through the menu options, emphasizing how \u201cawesome\u201d it would be if I wanted to discuss my business goals. I\u2019ll never have any, I thought, distractedly.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We use WordPress for the site. We\u2019re not alone. It\u2019s the world\u2019s most popular website-building software\u2014installed in something like a quarter of all sites in the world. It is free, it\u2019s versatile. Even the intractably codeless can use it, a quality I have always particularly admired. As I waited in the queue, WordPress\u2019s signature phrase, \u201cCode is poetry,\u201d came to mind\u2014a phrase woven into its pages at every opportunity from the very beginning. It is a simple, clear, memorable assertion. But what does it mean? Among other things, it\u2019s surely a reminder that code is writing, that we are talking about a language\u2014in fact a whole genre of languages. Like poetry, too, code strives for precision and economy. When a poem has everything it needs and nothing it doesn\u2019t, it is elegant, beautiful. To alter even one character of it is a potential transgression. Many say that code, too, can have such beauty. I\u2019m not in a position to judge. Right now, it\u2019s transgression that\u2019s on my mind.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n At last, a human voice, speaking in real time. My presumption, it turned out, had been tempered by a bit of prudence: I had set up a \u201cchild\u201d site beforehand, a kind of digital guinea pig. We would sacrifice it, and the \u201cparent\u201d would never know about the attempt to alter its code. In other words, a strictly secular absolution was at hand, \u201cin the service contract.\u201d This icy, calculated erasure of the immediate past had nothing to do with divine, infinite forgiveness. Nor could my relief or contrition be entered into the equation. No one pointed out the obvious, that if you don\u2019t know the language, you have no business writing in it. No one mentioned hubris. No one called me \u201cilliterate,\u201d however much I deserved it. For code has no voice. It is writing with no implication of sound, no reference to a human body, no memory of breath or tongue or teeth or heartbeat. It is a detached, minimal poetry that leaves the ancient fabric of human language behind and radically exploits just one narrow feature of writing: code is pure commandment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Code is Poetry I was certainly not thinking of poetry when I clicked on the website\u2019s \u201ceditor\u201d pages that day\u2014on the site\u2019s code, that is. I can\u2019t write code. I can recognize...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2884,"parent":1065,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1185","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1185"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2883,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1185\/revisions\/2883"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1065"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}