Whenever the computer typed
Please enter your name
the old folk used to turn to us and say
“Who am I talking to?”

And we, the researchers, would reply
“To the programmer – but he’s not here.
He’s left these messages for you to read.”
But the messages weren’t speech as such

nor were they writing, as we know it.
The programmer (the coder) called them “code”.
He wasn’t talking to his computer,
he was flying it, like a plane.

A plane is not a faithful ancient carthorse.
You do not fly a plane by speaking words
of comfort, reassurance, admonition,
kindness, love.

You turn the knobs, pull levers, swing a joystick.
The plane does not talk back to you in English:
The wings dip, the engine changes note,
the artificial horizon tilts and sways.

“Code” will look to you and me like English
or like the fearsome script of Mathematics.
It merely takes the place of sticks and knobs
when all you have is mouse and glowing screen.

The coder might write: a=’a’+1;
to get effectively the letter: ‘b’.
That isn’t Maths, it’s certainly not English,
it doesn’t even make good sense.

It just achieves the thing the coder wants,
flaunting his mastery of Man/Machine.
Coders I knew would talk to you in code.
To them it was no different from speech.

Words of reassurance, kindness, love,
were millions of miles beyond their ken.
The reason why they chose to train as coders:
they didn’t make remarkably good people.

The modern world is built by such as these.
Speech now is ungrammatical: mere chat.
The robots have supplanted flesh-and-blood
and lunatics now run the loony bin.