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Source Code Poetry

A review of my winning entry from the source code poetry competition 2020

The Source Code Poetry competition challenges participants to write some code that runs without any errors, but also reads as poetry. This post talks a little about my thought process when writing my poem.

Poem

A Coronavirus Haiku

Global pandemic
Starts with short breath, ends with death
A new type of bug

Make a difference
Be open to a small change
Care for those in need

Extend distance now,
for then in time we'll be close
If all help: sorted!

Stay strong and hopeful
While complex, they'll find a cure
- try not to object...

Finally, a huge
thank you doctors and nurses
True superheroes

coronavirus_haiku.py
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global pandemic
"".startswith("short breath"), \
"".endswith("death")
"a".__new__(type("of bug"))

{"make", "a"}.difference({})
be = open("to", "a"); "small change"
["care" for those in "need"]

[].extend(["distance", "now"])
for then in {"time": "we'll"}: be.close()
if all([help]): sorted("!")

stay:str("ong") and "hopeful"
while complex(): "they'll".find("a cure -")
try: not "to", object, ...

finally: a:"huge"
"thank you".__doc__+"tors" and "nurses"
True, super, "heroes"

Explanation

It is a poem about the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic written in python and is made up of 5 haiku

Haiku

A Haiku is a type of poem originating in Japan that consists of 3 lines, with the lines having 5, 7 and 5 syllables respectively

As Python is my favourite language at the moment, that's what I chose to write the poem in. That turned out to be a great choice, as Python's clean syntax made it fairly easy to write readable code. Obviously you could make a python module that was a single multiline string, but that isn't really in the spirit of the competition. Instead, I tried to fit as much of Python's varied syntax as I could into a single poem, making use of as many builtins as possible. To get inspired, I pulled all the keywords/builtins from python with:

import keyword
words = keyword.kwlist + dir(__builtins__)
# Filtering out Errors/Warnings as straight away it was clear 
# they would be hard to fit into any poem
words = [w for w in words if 'Error' not in w and 'Warning' not in w]
print(words)
Output: 
['False', 'None', 'True', 'and', 'as', 'assert', 'async', 'await', 'break', 'class', 'continue', 'def', 'del', 'elif', 'else', 'except', 'finally', 'for', 'from', 'global', 'if', 'import', 'in', 'is', 'lambda', 'nonlocal', 'not', 'or', 'pass', 'raise', 'return', 'try', 'while', 'with', 'yield', 'BaseException', 'Ellipsis', 'Exception', 'False', 'GeneratorExit', 'KeyboardInterrupt', 'None', 'NotImplemented', 'StopAsyncIteration', 'StopIteration', 'SystemExit', 'True', '_', '__build_class__', '__debug__', '__doc__', '__import__', '__loader__', '__name__', '__package__', '__spec__', 'abs', 'all', 'any', 'ascii', 'bin', 'bool', 'breakpoint', 'bytearray', 'bytes', 'callable', 'chr', 'classmethod', 'compile', 'complex', 'copyright', 'credits', 'delattr', 'dict', 'dir', 'divmod', 'enumerate', 'eval', 'exec', 'exit', 'filter', 'float', 'format', 'frozenset', 'getattr', 'globals', 'hasattr', 'hash', 'help', 'hex', 'id', 'input', 'int', 'isinstance', 'issubclass', 'iter', 'len', 'license', 'list', 'locals', 'map', 'max', 'memoryview', 'min', 'next', 'object', 'oct', 'open', 'ord', 'pow', 'print', 'property', 'quit', 'range', 'repr', 'reversed', 'round', 'set', 'setattr', 'slice', 'sorted', 'staticmethod', 'str', 'sum', 'super', 'tuple', 'type', 'vars', 'zip']

Reading through this list hoping to get some inspiration, the global keyword jumped straight out, and I started trying to put together a short haiku around the current pandemic, making use of defining global variables in python with a first line of 

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global pandemic

It then snowballed from there and after adding in the builtin methods such as startswith and difference, I found myself with enough material for several paragraphs.

Some of the parts I am happiest with are:

  
  
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be = open("to", "a");
...
for then in {"time": "we'll"}: be.close()
which creates and opens a file called 'to' in the current directory in append mode, then later closes it making use of the homophone 'close'.

And also

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try: not "to", object, ...

finally: a:"huge"
which makes use of a try/finally clause over two paragraphs, which is valid syntax but less common than the try/except or try/except/finally clauses.

I'm also glad I was able to make use of if, while, for, try as well as a list comprehension.

Overall I was pretty happy with the end result and thankful to the judges of the competition for selecting it as the winning entry.