Chapter 2: Unreal, artless
Programmers often describe programming as a creative activity, and non-programmers may as often suspect that they want to enliven the inscrutably dull image of the coder hunched over their laptop with some of the windswept glamour of the poet communing with nature. The programmer struck by a blinding insight while waiting at a bus stop, or the poet who spends a fruitless hour perusing the thesaurus and counting on their fingers may call the implied difference into question, but it is undeniable that much of our time as programmers is spent dealing with the bureaucratic manipulation of abstractions far removed from everyday life.
But such rule-bound artifice has its own pleasures—ask any sudoku devotee!
We already played with numbers in the previous chapter; in this chapter, we’re going to play with words. Before, we started with some code and gradually took it apart. This time, we’re going to start from nothing and gradually build up some code.