The Computation of Poetry

i was using had a chatty, helpful compiler that told me where the bug was and what was wrong—sort of. the trouble was that even when i printed the code and stared at the recalcitrant line, the bug remained hidden. in the end, i finally saw my error: i’d spelled “goto” with two zeros instead of two os. the characters are next to each other on the keyboard, and when printed, they looked almost identical. the error was trivial—even funny—but it soured my view of programming forever. now, as a writer and editor, i reassure myself that writing is so much more forgiving than coding. if a word doesn’t fit, i can pick another. english is much more flexible than Fortran. but one form of literary endeavor, poetry, shares some properties with programming. “predict” has several synonyms, for example—including foretell, prophesy, forecast— shakespeare picked “prognosticate” for his 14th sonnet: