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Programming as literature?
(the world according to YouTube)

9 July 2013

by Huw Collingbourne

When you upload videos to YouTube, you are prompted to add ’tags’ to identify its subject matter.

YouTube analyses your tags and then makes suggestions for other tags that might be appropriate. Today I uploaded a new video in my series about programming for beginners. This is what I saw in my web browser. At the top you are the tags I added. Below you can see the tags that YouTube suggests...

’Programming Language (Literary Genre)’? What the heck does that mean? Is there a literary genre of programming>? I’ve been trying to think which books might qualify: Tom Sharpe’s ’Riotous Assembly Language’ maybe? Hemingway’s ’The Old Man and the C’ perhaps? P G Wodehouse’s ’Programming Code of The Woosters’ no doubt qualifies. And as for Dan Brown’s ’The Da Vinci Code’ - well need I say more?