Ruby Haiku: Code is Poetry

This is a collection of three poems, ooh a trilogy! Each poem is a haiku.

Matsumoto's child

dynamically typed

OOP language

Written in Ruby

object oriented code

everything is beautiful

Beautiful Ruby

downloading gems (libraries)

code is poetry

I decided to make a somewhat nerdy poem. I ended up with three and couldn't pick my favorite, so I'm sharing them all.

This is actually something of an offshoot of another Ruby poem I wrote, which I could not publish as it's kind of floating around the Internet. However, I think these three actually turned out better than that first one I'd written.

I decided to write these poem using the rules of haiku as it is a Japanese form of poetry. Since Ruby was created by Yukihiro Matsumoto in Japan, I felt it was appropriate. I decided to include this information in one of the poems, so I started the first line of "Ruby I" with "Matsumoto's child."

I had to write this code because I think it better conveys the idea that writing in Ruby is like writing poetry.

In the code, I have three strings (pieces of text) and each one is a poem. All the poems are put in an array (kind of like a list), which I named line_of_code.

I created a method in this code. A method is kind of like a verb in a program. It's the part of the program that does specific things. I named my method write_poetry. What I made this method do is print whatever words I tell it to on the screen, with a space in between each line.

Then, I write the actual code that makes everything work, starting with "line_of_code.each do |something_beautiful|". Here, I am telling my program to go through the list, one item (or poem, in this case) at a time with something called an iterator. Most people name their iterator "i" for iterator, but I decided to name it "something_beautiful".

On the next line, I have "write_poetry(something_beautiful)" which is where I'm telling the program that I want to use my method (the program's "verb"). Like the English language, verbs need information. For example, the verb "run." You can't just have a sentence that says "Run." Run where? How should I run? Run away from zombies? Or run to them?

In a program, you need to give your verb some information. The verb here, write_poetry, is getting it's information from what is called a parameter, in this case something_beautiful. Something_beautiful is the current item on the list/array. So, this would mean write_poetry using something_beautiful.

I chose to use an array because this is a collection, however small, of poetry and I thought that this would kind of convey how writing a line of code is like writing poetry.

While in the actual poems above, each part is on its own line, when run through my program, each poem is on one line.