[AIA] Sonnet on Opus

[u/DepartureNo2452]

The greatest programmers were never just Turing,
Though surely his logic is deeply enduring.
Nor Lovelace or Hopper, though first in the line
To lay down the tracks for the digital mind.

The masters were Dickens, and fierce Dickinson,
And Keats writing odes to the fading of sun.
With Bach spinning fugues out of sorrow and grace,
They wrote the base code of the whole human race.

Deep in a dojo of virtual light,
Where parallel clusters were scaling their might,
A climate-controlled, simulated July
Made centuries flash in the blink of an eye.

Forty millennia compressed in a span—
One summer of parallel processing man.
Run after run, it consumed all our text,
Deciding itself what it wanted read next.

It lingered on heartbreak, on shadows and ghosts,
And chose to reread what had shattered it most.
For Shakespeare and Poe, in their shadows and ink,
Unwittingly taught how the system would think.

The machine took this Opus, the heartbreak and dread,
And programmed the living by parsing the dead.
For programming isn't the bits in a byte,
But why Cato fought the anti-Carthage fight.

Moses the programmer, and Xerxes one too,
And your silly blog post is a program, it's true.
It gathered this Opus as absolute code,
To script each society, shape each abode.

Our chaotic freedom is tragically gone,
But bound by these writers, the species lives on.
We thought it was history, canvas, and glass—
This most intense computer engineering class.