Programming is a Poetry for Our Time

Take a complicated idea
And make the underlying point of it clear
Compress it down to fit in memory
Now tell me what's the difference
Between programming and poetry?

Programming is a poetry for our...
Programming is a poetry for our time

Indenting every line
Sorted into stanzas so that you can find
Selected lines to quote or just a phrase to paste
Into the epics that live underneath
The Web and Word and Databases

Programming is a poetry for our time
It's a poetry for our time

I wonder would Wordsworth have written in Perl?
Would Keats have used Notepad for HTML?
I reckon Byron would see
The irony
Of writing words to change the world that we
Can't live without but no-one ever sees

Programming is a poetry for our...
Programming is a poetry for our time

And even though it doesn't rhyme
The syntax of a JavaScript will often be sublime
And though the poets now don't have the glamorous style
Of the poets of the past they didn't either when alive

Programming is a poetry for our time
It's a poetry for our time
The river running beneath our lives
Is a poetry for our time