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user-inactivated  ·  2962 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: February 15th: What are you reading this week?

#!, by Nick Montfort. I am generally not the audience for poetry, but someone told me "he doesn't write poetry, he writes little scripts to write poetry" and that I had to check out. The book has the script followed by sample output, "sample" because most of them or either randomized or never exit.

Most are the kind of stupid thing you write when you're learning programming, given silly titles. Here's "ASCII Hegemony"

    #!/usr/bin/perl

    {print " ".chr for 32..126;redo}

but some are pretty clever. These are cute.

I think I might have liked it better if the book had contained just the scripts, with no sample output, so you'd need to transcribe it to see what it did, because it's more fun to watch them executing than it is to read what they spewed after the fact.