The essay seems to miss the point. While programs have little in common with the written word the act of programming is similar to the act of writing in that s

The essay seems to miss the point. While programs have little in common with the written word the act of programming is similar to the act of writing in that someone will read your code. It's not that hard to write something that people can decode, but it usually takes a fair amount of revision to remove the craft and add clarity. That’s not to say everything must be a masterpiece, but just as a great speech can inspire a nation some code just plain runs things. PS: The most interesting program I ever read fit into 4kilobytes of ram. At the low level it employed plenty of twisted logic to fit into a limited environment, but the overall structure was plenty elegant to call it poetic. Just think cooperative multithreading, networking, and the ability to deal with quite a bit of memory errors in 16kbyte of source code and yet you could still understand what's going on.