It’s a collection of poems written in Swift programming language.
They are written by me, Krzysztof Siejkowski. I’m striving to publish a new poem every week.
Writing poems in programming languages is known as code poetry.
Yes, they all compile and run. I’m writing them in the Xcode playgrounds. You can take a look at the source code here.
However, I’ve decided to not include the symbols definitions, like classes, variables, methods, functions etc. in the poems. I believe they would be mostly just adding the noise to the actual content. However, it’s just my opinion, and it might very much change in the future! 😄
I’m a software developer from Warsaw, Poland. I mostly work on mobile apps for iOS platform, which I’ve been doing since 2011, though I also had pleasure to work on Android apps, C++ SDKs and Scala backends.
I’m writing code poetry because I find it fascinating. I’m constantly blown away by the creativity I discover in the code poems.
I love how diverse this literary niche is and how you can work with these poems on so many levels: the level of English language, the level of programming language, the level of the actual outcome the poem produces when it’s being executed.
I also love how much there’s still to be explored in the code poetry world.
Code poetry is a somewhat niche literary form. The samples of it are available online in various places and forms. The main sources I am following are:
code::art — “an art journal which publishes code”. New project curated by Sy Brand that showcases the code poetry and other code art. Check it out! Free pdf and ability to order printed version.
Source Code Poetry Challenge — a competition held annually where people from all around the world share their code poems and the jury chooses 3 best ones. Their facebook page is the most up-to-date one.
code --poetry by Daniel Holden and Chris Kerr — a great book of code poetry, available also in pdf and print form, but website shows the execution of the poems which is really well crafted
Stanford Code Poetry slam — a slam organized few times (four times?) at the Stanford University. Most links are unfortually already dead but a Google search should bring various media articles about the events.
Vienna Code Poetry slam — a slam held annually at Vienna, Austria.
There are also multiple various pages, blogs, tumblrs, instagram feeds, facebook feeds, twitter profiles and so on. I encourage you, whatever social media you use or whatever browsing habits you have, just search for “code poetry” at your platform of choice.
I know of 6 code poetry books that are printed and available in physical form:
{code poems} gathered by Ishac Bertran — available at laie.
code --poetry by Daniel Holden and Chris Kerr — available at Amazon.
3 Code Poetry book from the course given by Shawn Lawson — available at Lulu: part 1, part 2, part 3.
code::art journal curated by Sy Brand — available at code::art online store
If you know of any more code poetry books, please let me know, I’d love to get them in my hands! ☺️