Why not a programmer laureate?

It was one of those link-off-a-link-clicking situations. Not quite the Hansel-and-Gretel path of moonlit breadcrumbs, but close: The UK has crowned it new poet laureate (apparently, a term-limited gig).

Power and brevity vie for the title of poetry's foremost virtue. (Other than a keen appreciation of your staggering ignorance of your mother tongue, that's the big take-away of an English degree.) That goes for the best poetry, anyway. Not the dolce far niente stuff of shepherds panting after milkmaids-a-Maying that was sanitized for your high-school textbooks.

Yet the same power vs. brevity question can be said for programming. And the differing purposes of code are varied like poetry: There is the bling meant to catch the eye (like the Hallmark card). There is the metered kow-towing to aggrandize the egoes of the powerful (a.k.a. the pointless feature some corner-office "designer" insisted you add before release). There is the taut minimalism of the late-cycle hack (not unlike the sparseness of the street poet's oevre). There is the self-indulgent navel-gazing of the student-programmer that shuns mere evolution in favor of revolution. And then there is the backbone code--almost forgotten behind its antediluvian "last modified" file date--that allows us to peek at the almost alien world of the past, giving us fresh insight into why we do what we do.

It's wishful thinking, I know, but it would be nice if programmers had a lofty enough opinion of their craft to select their own laureate. Surely, with all the CVS/SVN/Git/Etc. repositories in place, authorship would be easy enough to establish. The only question is: Is the laureate entitled to ~600 bottles of sherry? ;-)