Ciaran Laval alerted me to a project which, having been announced on April 1st, might have been considered a joke; it seems, however, that it isn’t.
Posting over on SLU (twice, it seems), LSL Portal editor and scripter Strife Onizuka, who is spearheading the project, describes matters thus:
Long have we struggled with how to make the documentation more accessible. One of the most common complaints is that is simply too technical and we are hearing this more often than you would believe from one of SL’s more traditional content creators: descriptive writers. So I am proud to announce that after many sleepless nights we have come up with a way to address this. As the core problem is that the documentation relies upon very specific, technical language we have come up with a way to bring more mundane verbiage into the documentation.
To achieve this end we are announcing the LSL Portal Poetry Project! The goal of the LPPP (or LP³ as I like to think of it), is to provide poetry for every LSL Event, Function and Constant. More specifically, the form of poetry we have chosen is Haiku. Screen real estate being at a premium haiku requires the minimum amount of space while packing the greatest metaphorical punch.
It appears that the essential element of the haiku – the five-seven-five syllable arrangement – is key to any submitted verse; the traditional invoking an aspect of nature or the seasons being not quite so important, as with this example for llSetTorque:
Spinning, all a blur…
Small moment of inertia.
They say torque is cheap.
There have already been a number of LSL articles which have gained their own haiku, and people from across SLU (and SL) are being invited to consider putting forward suitable pieces for those articles still lacking a verse.
While haiku is the preferred medium, other forms of poetry are not ruled out. Strike admits the limerick ran the haiku a close second for choice of verse form, and it may be that some LSL functions may be better suited to the limerick or other forms of verse. For example, lSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast leant itself to this limerick Atasha Toshihiko:
I once had a hair full of scripts,
When I wore it, Estate Owners had fits.
The creator, at long last
Learned llSetLinkPrimParametersFast
Now I can wear hair without getting kicked!
Strife also says of the project:
Programming is a part of life. It doesn’t have a holiday. People don’t think to write songs or poems about it except in jest. We treat it as a second class citizen, something utilitarian to be used and ignored. But culture has to come from somewhere, it can’t all be about, love and dancing and taking selfies. Eventually someone has to write a song about cloth-driers and warm socks (Who doesn’t like warm socks fresh out of the dryer?) …
There is nothing about LSL that will sustain it past SL’s death, except maybe some obscure poetry. How many programming languages after all encourage their users to write poetry? It will tell future anthropologist just who we were. Not just about our preference for indentation.
So, you may not be a coder, but if you have an inner poet, and feel you’d like to help enshrine LSL in words of verse, now is your opportunity to do so!
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 