IDE poetry

I posted this on tumblr and got a decent response from it, so I think it's a sign that it works and it provokes feelings in people and that I should continue doing it.

I'm definitely not the first person to do poetry that is as visual as it is textual. And I'm not the first to use screengrabs to change the way text lays on a page. Part of my inspiration actually came from this piece I saw floating around the internet

Problem is, I have no idea who wrote this... so if someone else does, please let me know!

I was talking to one of my dearest friends, Ben, yesterday about writing poetry in a coding environment, and he mentioned another conceptual layer: code is always in the background. No one really knows what it looks like. It's hard to read and understand. By writing poetry in a programming environment, maybe I will subvert that. Give people an insight to what programming looks like. Write things in a plain language that is frank and easy to understand.

The next step is to write algorithmic poetry - poems that I don't write myself, but instead use an algorithm to write it for me, like this entry in the 2011 Mathematica One-Liner Challenge:

This line of code nearly generates adjective-noun pairs who are anagrams of one another. It's very dada-like and so creative! I really want to learn more programming so I can do something like that.

Anyways, that's it. Finals are coming up and I have two papers to finish so I shouldn't be blogging anyways :P Much love.