The Literate Programmer’s Manifesto
A poem in amphibrachtic verse.
What is a program supposed to do?
A program is data, which if put through
the execution on a machine,
has certain behaviour that will be seen.
But readability too is required:
the maintainer's mind must be inspired
with what that behaviour that should be seen
was thought in the programmer's brain to *have been*!
You see, your code's not written by you,
for your machine to just instantly do.
Your code will travel through space and time
from your computer console ... to mine.
Coding's not just a solitary chore.
Code is read, checked, modified, debugged, and more.
So to you, to all humans; right now and years hence
poor code is sinful; good code just makes sense.
- Jamie 'literate code' Gabbay, November 2015