No this is not some vague philosophical point about code being so beautiful it is a logical poem - although it undoubtedly is - this is real poetry. It has to rhyme and it has to compile. 

The source code poetry competition has been going for a while, but it doesn't seem to have run out of steam. 

This year's main prize for the best compilable poetry was won by *The American C* by *Done Lean*. It is a C program that laments the passing of the old ways and their replacment by this terrible C++ object stuff. 

In case you didn't get it:

all that, changed, when; class es{} came;
we got, spoiled, And, thats = a, shame;

all is, broken, nothing;s same
, c_plus_plus, has, killed, the, flame;

No one said poetry couldn't be controversial. Personally I'd have given them the prize for the title and *Done Lean*.

The winner of the "bend the rules" category is very strange poem in the Piet programming language which has a bitmap as its source code. It is called "Bark" as the program looks like the bark of a tree. Apparently if you run it it outputs a haiku about what the source code looks like.

And to be 100% clear this is the source code of the program:

Not knowing very much about Piet I have had to take their word for it. 

You can find out more about the competition, view previous winners and contemplate taking part in next year's at the web site.

One final controversial rule:

"The poetry must properly compile in either Java, C# or C++. The dynamic languages are discouraged (too easy!) but may be accepted if solution is unbelievably cool."

More Information

Source Code Poetry

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