On Writing Code and Writing Poems at Geek Wire

Frances McCue writes for Geek Wire about living and writing amidst Seattle's tech industry, during the Covid-19 pandemic. "Was writing code, I wondered, really like writing poems? Around me, the city was filled with the effects of technology: glassy new buildings and sleek new bike paths." More: 

Artists and poets lived here too, mostly in the soon-to-be-teardowns off to the side of this Tupperware-scape. I considered that, despite their difference in earnings, poets and coders followed similar processes in their work, playing with images and symbols to make something happen.

Those coders and I — we both traded in language. Whether the language was Java or C or our own spoken languages, poets and coders manipulated symbols into syntax, promising logical paths that shimmer with different effects. A coder made the Word program that catches my spelling errors and simulates paragraphs. Her goals were specific though the “reader,” for her, is a computer that does not ingest nuance, only instructions. For this, I’m thankful.

Read more at Geek Wire.