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Harvard MBA student Diana Kimball, in a 2013 interview on CBC radio, talked about coding as an art form. Diana claimed that most people give up on coding because it is often perceived as “ manual work ” rather than a creative way of interacting with data. While Diana herself admitted that part of it is just work, for her the other parts were “ a dialogue between you and your imagination, and a dialogue with the real or imagined users of what you are creating – a website, a game, or an app .” It’s like writing a poem – a way for you to exchange your thoughts and imagination with those of your readers. [Source: Code is Poetry ]
I learned to program in the second year of my university degree in computer science. And I really fell in love with the art of writing instructions in different languages (Assembler, Fortran, Algol, Pascal, Ada, etc.) in order to make computers work with applications that are useful to people. Although, for example, Pascal was created by Niklaus Wirth between 1968 and 1969, and published in 1970, I studied it at the beginning of the 80s. And it was our programming teacher who transmitted his passion for programming to us and who made us see the importance of coding well. Because before 1968, programming languages could lead you to code poorly, and it was Niklaus Wirth who promoted the principles of “structured programming,” especially in the academic field, discarding -without going any further- the “Go to” instruction, the cause of what was called “ spaghetti ” programming.
Structured programming, which emerged in the 1960s and was postulated -among others- by Edsger Dijkstra, gave rise to the Algol language and is a programming paradigm aimed at improving the clarity, quality and development time of a computer program using only subroutines and three basic control structures: sequence, selection ( if and switch ) and iteration ( for and while loops );
Comic from Blogpocket’s programming course for beginnersI earned my first few bucks by giving private programming lessons, while still a university student. And then, my working life was closely linked to the development of applications for mainframe computers . At Telefónica I had the opportunity to design, code and implement complex systems, two of which stand out: an interface to interact with the magnetic tape assembly robot and a system to automate all transmissions between the company’s computers (mainframes and Unix) (internal and external) using several different file transfer products.
My final year project was about Karel, a very simple system to teach programming, creating an interface written in Pascal.
When I started blogging, I immediately felt the need to develop my own publishing system, which is how “Blogpocket” came about (probably a bad translation, although it sounded better than PocketBlog ?), a PHP application of my own that I used for a couple of years until I switched to Movable Type and then to WordPress.
I then collaborated with Gemma Ferreres (from Tintachina.com) to carry out the first two annual surveys that were carried out in Spain in order to find out the behaviour of bloggers and blog readers (2004 and 2005). My part was, of course, to program it in PHP to provide an online tool that would allow the surveys to be carried out easily.
I have always loved programming. And I have not stopped doing it, to a greater or lesser extent, outside of my work life. During these almost 23 years of Blogpocket (next January 25th is the 23rd anniversary), my occupation has not only been publishing content related to blogging, but also creating work methods to create optimized WordPress websites and develop snippets, plugins or themes related to it. Formacio.artxtu.com , Mireia Puente’s website, is an example, in which beneath the site there is a small coded implementation to communicate with the ACF plugin and thus be able to build a database of custom data types. Another example was, at the beginning of 2020, the Blogpocket Nineteen theme, a proposal to customize the front-end of a WordPress website using exclusively the editor blocks (Gutenberg).
So, it is not surprising that as soon as I heard about ChatGPT, in November 2022, I became interested in how to interact from code, thus creating WP A DAY , a podcast made with AI. And it is no mystery either that, despite all my experience, I am not afraid of generative artificial intelligence, which is, after all, a very sophisticated program. Who would have told us university students of computer science that what we saw in that theoretical subject of Artificial Intelligence, in the mid-80s, would one day materialize into something practical and tangible?
And yes, I also think like that Harvard MBA student in 2013, code is poetry.
PS. “Code is poetry” is a motto used in WordPress that suggests the idea that the open source software underlying the platform has been written with art and care, and that code, like poetry, is a form of expression that can be beautiful and elegant, yet powerful and meaningful. The phrase is often used to express the idea that writing code is an art form, and that good code should be as aesthetically pleasing as a poem.
https://acambronero.wordpress.com/2024/09/09/code-is-poetry/
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