Reading "Coders"

Two hours of reading Coders, this account of the culture and ethos of the engineers of logarithms, suss out the nerdy types I rarely meet (but am very much aware of). My reaction is part envy and part amusement: I'm envious that my artistic temperament (you are free to judge if I'm really an artist) isn't more of the pedantic coder's, thus, being a generalist, I have not had many euphoric 'aha' moments similar to a coder's high when she busts a bug, technology works again, and the user is happy.

To be a coder is to plod through a myriad of frustrations when hacking through smelly code until it is cracked and the glitch is fixed. To be an artist is to care passionately about life, even for only a portion of it. The 'poet' as artist must care by engaging every day's puzzle like a coder, mulling over it and trying out solutions however tendentious, until insight leads to a fresh direction. But while  a coder's fix guarantees that a system previously not doing what it should do will now do what it is told to do, a poet's fix is hardly ever a tinker.

The author's metaphors in describing the coder -- as writer, as editor, as poet -- bring me to ground zero of creation itself. You sit down, you labor, you never let up until you've got it right. For the coder to come to the end of the puzzle is to truly find euphoric rest, but for the poet, this only means the end of poetry itself.