{"id":21916,"date":"2020-01-22T21:37:19","date_gmt":"2020-01-23T02:37:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=21916"},"modified":"2020-01-22T21:51:43","modified_gmt":"2020-01-23T02:51:43","slug":"speaking-in-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=21916","title":{"rendered":"Speaking in code"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I’ve been practicing memorizing Puck’s closing speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream<\/i>. It’s one of my favorite speeches, and I think that I now have it down.<\/p>\n

Except of course when I am nervous. Unfortunately the thing that makes me nervous is reciting it in the presence of other people. Oh well.<\/p>\n

One thing I’ve noticed is that the lines of Puck’s speech start with a lot of familiar words. In particular, the following words all appear at least once as the first word in a line:<\/p>\n

\nIf
\nElse
\nNow
\nAnd
\nWhile
\nThat\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you’re a programmer, you will recognize that these are all keywords that are widely used in modern computer programming languages. So what does that mean? Are the lines in Shakespeare plays actually runnable as valid computer programs, if only we can find the right compiler?<\/p>\n

Maybe our modern programming languages were influenced by the great Bard. Or maybe Mr. Shakespeare was the first computer programmer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently I’ve been practicing memorizing Puck’s closing speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s one of my favorite speeches, and I think that I now have it down. Except of course when I am nervous. Unfortunately the thing that makes me nervous is reciting it in the presence of other people. Oh well. One thing … Continue reading “Speaking in code”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21916"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21916"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21920,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21916\/revisions\/21920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}