Techies vs. Fuzzies: Why Coding is Poetry

By Larissa Bersh

Even before I arrived on campus for the first time, I remember being plagued with the same question, over and over: what are you majoring in? And then, after finding out I was going to Stanford, the inevitable half-joking query: techie or fuzzy?

The answer for me, as for many others, has not been so simple. Growing up, I was a humanities girl through and through. Not a day went by where I wouldn’t spend hours at my desk, writing away, or curled into an armchair, hooked on my newest favorite book series.

When my acceptance letter from Stanford arrived, I remained determined: humanities were my calling. But I also knew I had to take advantage of all the classes that were uniquely Stanford — and CS106A, Stanford’s introductory programming course, was at the top of that list.

At first, it felt like the very presence of a STEM course on my study list — and not just any STEM course, but one I was taking out of my own free will — was some sort of betrayal. I felt guilty, like I was breaking from my roots, diverging from the path that had brought me so selflessly to where I stood: at the brink of possibility. It would be a shame not to take advantage of all Stanford had to offer, but I was afraid to be branded as a sell-out, an abandoner of the humanities for the often more-attractive prospects of STEM.

But it was just one class. So on September 20th, when course enrollment opened for fall quarter, I took a deep breath and clicked “enroll”.

A lot has changed since then, and at the forefront of that change — perhaps even the catalyst driving the rest — has been the shift that’s occurred for me with regards to the binary of techie vs. fuzzy. As the end of my first quarter at Stanford rapidly approaches, I’m struck by how familiar my experience with computer science has felt. I was expecting it to be something foreign, expecting to stumble blindly through the class, disadvantaged by my years of focusing on writing and reading and not much else. But perhaps that’s exactly what’s helped me grasp these new concepts — because maybe the two disciplines are not so different after all.

What I’ve come to find is that, in many ways, code is poetry. It isn’t the same kind of poetry we read in class or write after breakups, but it’s poetry nonetheless. Because when you strip away the meter and the rhyme and all the bells and whistles you find in the art of Frost or Hughes, what you’re left with is simply language.

Language — in its purest form. Just as I tend to get lost in the twists and turns and dead ends of my writing, so, too, do I get lost in the labyrinth of code. Just as I interact with the characters I create, understanding them as I create them, so, too, do I interpret and interact with my programs. I erase and rewrite, comment out and recode, wrestle with how to tell my stories — how to get from point A to point B in the way that will best achieve my goals. It doesn’t matter what those goals are, whether it’s to invoke some feeling in the reader, or to transfer something into working code in the most efficient manner possible. Any and all of these goals are realized through the same process: through the strategic manipulation and understanding of language.

Computer science and poetry: two of the most unlikely words to be coupled together in a sentence. And yet, in my world, the two are often one and the same.

I realize now that it was never writing itself that I loved, but rather the process behind the words, that roving spirit of creativity any art form demands.

Now when someone asks what I’m majoring in, I tell them I’m undecided. But when I sit in front of my laptop, typing away, I know it doesn’t matter whether I’m open to a Word doc or Eclipse. Either way, the real answer is art.