[mbrock]

Christopher Alexander, the architect who introduced the theory of "pattern languages," wrote the introduction to Richard P. Gabriel's "Patterns of Software." He says:

"In my life as an architect, I find that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low. If I ask a student whether her design is as good as Chartres, she often smiles tolerantly at me as if to say, 'Of course not, that isn't what I am trying to do. I could never do that.'"

Then: "That standard must be our standard. If you are going to be a builder, no other standard is worthwhile."

And so he asks the same thing about programming.

"But at once I run into a problem. For a programmer, what is a comparable goal? What is the Chartres of programming? What task is at a high enough level to inspire people writing programs, to reach for the stars? Can you write a computer program on the same level as Fermat's last theorem? Can you write a program which has the enabling power of Dr. Johnson's dictionary? Can you write a program which has the productive power of Watt's steam engine? Can you write a program which overcomes the gulf between the technical culture of our civilization, and which inserts itself into our human life as deeply as Eliot's poems of the wasteland or Virginia Woolf's The Waves?"

Maybe code is just bad literature?