DEV Community: Boris Orekhov

Chess & Computer Tech Today – A Programmer’s Take

Boris Orekhov — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 05:25:00 +0000

Chess & Computer Tech Today – A Programmer’s Take

Remember when beating a human at chess was the holy grail of AI? In 1972, it was literally the benchmark. Fast forward to today: a random office desktop crushes any grandmaster. Game over? Not even close.

Chess didn’t die – it went full cyberpunk. And as a programmer who barely knows a fork from a fianchetto (my Lichess rating is ~800), I’ve become obsessed with how code reshaped this ancient game. Here’s what every dev should care about.

1. Analysis engines – the real MVP

Every chess move today gets instantly judged by an engine. That little “thermometer” on stream? It’s a live eval bar. One blunder, and the score tanks from +2 to -3 – you feel the drama.

But here’s the fun part for us: I built vector models of chess games using word2vec. Treating moves like words in a sentence. Preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2407.19600. Turns out, chess positions embed nicely into vector space. Who knew?

2. Cheating – from SMS to… sex toys?

Cheating in chess is not like doping. A single engine move at the right moment = game over. So offline tournaments scan players like airport security.

But the real WTF moment: during the 2022 Carlsen–Niemann scandal, Elon Musk suggested Niemann might have received moves via a remote-controlled vibrating sex toy hidden inside his body. Yes, seriously.

And how would you encode a chess move without Bluetooth? French team at 2010 Olympiad used SMS + captain standing near imaginary chessboard squares. Programmers, think about it: you could encode a move with just 2 vibrations (source square, target square). Someone even wrote Python demo for that.

3. Online chess – pre-moves, flag-hunting, and lag

Online blitz (3+0, 3+1) is a different beast. Premoves let you queue your next move while opponent thinks. Click, and it executes instantly when their move arrives. No physical clock button. No “oops I dropped the knight”.

But then you get flag-hunting – players in losing positions spam premoves hoping the winner runs out of time. Old-school champ Kramnik calls it unethical. New generation says “it’s in the rules”.

The ultimate test? A 2024 match between Kramnik (legend, hates flag-hunting) and Jospem (online phenom, suspected cheater). Half the games OTB, half online, same room back-to-back. Result: inconclusive. But the drama? Chef’s kiss. Also, organizers printed fresh laptops – Windows updates caused lag only for one player. Conspiracy? Probably just Windows.

Why it matters for devs

Chess is no longer about “intelligence”. It’s about psychology, emotion, and… code. We built machines that play perfect chess, then humans kept playing anyway. Now we’re debating: does a premove change the nature of the game? Is online chess “real” chess? Can we detect cheaters from move statistics?

These are our questions – systems design, anomaly detection, real-time constraints, UI/UX of time controls.

And the best part? No definitive answers. Just like software engineering.

Combinatorics of Beads

Boris Orekhov — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 05:10:00 +0000

🧩 Combinatorics of Beads: When Tang Poetry Meets Chess in Python

What if you could shuffle classical Chinese verses using chess moves — and get weird, wonderful new poetry?

If you’ve ever read Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, you know the feeling: a mysterious, intellectual game where players combine symbols from music, math, art, and literature to create beautiful, useless patterns. Hesse never explained the rules. He wanted every reader to invent their own.

So I did. With Python.

Meet Chess Bead Game – a small Python package that lets Tang dynasty poems (8 lines × 7 characters + punctuation = 8×8 grid) play a game of chess against themselves. Each character is a square. Every move swaps two characters. After 40 moves, the poem becomes… something else.

And something surprisingly poetic.

🎯 The Rules (such as they are)

Take a classical Chinese poem from the Tang era (7 characters per line, 8 lines → 8×8 board).
Load a real chess game from a PGN file.
For each move: swap the characters on the from and to squares.
Watch the original text mutate – step by step, move by move.
No practical purpose whatsoever. ✔️

That’s it. Pure, useless, beautiful combinatorial art.

🐍 Show Me the Code

import chess_bead as cb

game = cb.Game()           # loads a random poem + a random chess game
verses = game.start_game() # run all moves

viz = cb.Viz(verses, game.author, game.title)
viz.gif()                  # creates an animation of the whole transformation

That’s literally it. Two lines to shuffle an 8th‑century poem using a Kasparov‑vs‑Topalov knight sacrifice.

📜 Before & After (with Machine Translation)

Original poem (anonymous Tang style):

新婦去年胼手足，
衣不暇縫蠶廢簇。
白頭使我憂家事，
還如夜裏燒殘燭。
當初為取傍人語，
豈道如今自辛苦。
在時縱嫌織絹遲，
有絲不上鄰家機。

Translation (DeepL):

Last year the bride’s hands and feet were calloused,
No time to sew, silkworms abandoned in their frames.
White hair makes me worry about family matters,
Like a candle burning low in the night.
At first I listened to other people’s gossip,
How could I know I’d suffer so myself?
Back then I complained that weaving silk was too slow,
But now I have silk – yet won’t use the neighbor’s loom.

After 10 chess moves – same characters, completely new order:

新裏去年胼手家，
衣不暇婦憂廢簇。
白頭使我蠶足事，
還如夜織燒殘不。
當初為嫌絲人語，
豈道縫今自辛苦。
在時縱取傍絹遲，
有如燭上鄰家機。

New translation:

Last year in the inner chamber, calloused hands stayed home,
No time for the woman – worries over wasted silk frames.
White hair makes me busy with silkworm matters,
Yet like weaving at night, burning the candle but not quite.
At first I disliked the gossiping people,
How did I know the seams would now be stiff with toil?
Back then I freely took the silk, but too slow,
It's like a candle on the neighbor's loom.

The two versions enter a dialogue. The banal candle becomes surreal. Helplessness turns into defiant.

♟️ Why Programmers Will Love This

It’s completely useless – perfect for a side project.
Combinatorial explosion – 64! possible permutations, but constrained by chess move legality.
Data mashing – poetry × chess × machine translation × animation.
Plug‑and‑play architecture – easily extend to other text grids (Latin hexameters? Haiku? ASCII art?).
Python package on PyPI – pip install chess_bead and you’re ready.

The package already includes:

A small corpus of Tang‑style 8×8 poems.
PGN parser for real chess games.
GIF generator (shows each move as a frame).
DeepL integration? No, but you can pipe the output yourself.

🧠 The Bigger Picture

Hesse dreamed of a game that weaves together mathematics, music, astronomy, Greek, Latin, and Chinese wisdom. This is one tiny step: chess (rules) + Chinese poetry (data) + randomness (deterministic but emergent).

The next steps? Add mathematical sequences, musical notation, ancient Greek fragments, maybe a SPARQL endpoint to Wikidata. Imagine a game where a Beethoven motif, a line from Ovid, and a tangram shape swap places according to chess rules.

Yes, it’s absurd.

Yes, it’s beautiful.

Yes, I want to see the GIF.

📦 Get It / Try It

PyPI: chess_bead
Docs: chess-bead.readthedocs.io
GitHub: github.com/nevmenandr/chess_bead

pip install chess_bead

Then run the 3‑line script above and watch poetry disintegrate into art.

🎼 “Let it resound in our games, in our whole life, in everything we create and endure!”

― Hermann Hesse (paraphrased)

Inspired by Alexander Genis’s confession: “In *The Glass Bead Game, I was only interested in the game itself. Everything else – just because.”*

When Code Speaks Latin and Acts Like Shakespeare

Boris Orekhov — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 05:02:00 +0000

When Code Speaks Latin and Acts Like Shakespeare Or why programmers secretly love useless beauty

You’d think poetry and programming are light-years apart. They aren’t. Their intersection is the charming, useless zone where engineers become artists.

🧠 Natural languages vs. code

Linguistics isn’t pure humanities — it’s closer to biology. But programming languages have words, syntax, and expressiveness. Just like in human speech, you can say anything in any programming language. The difference? How many lines you write and how much cruft the CPU swallows.

Latin lets you say “the generation that will beget even worse” in one tight phrase. Russian? Awkward illiteracy. Same in code: Python is concise but hides massive overhead. Assembly is verbose but brutally efficient.

🔁 The assignment quirk

Most languages write x = 5 (right to left).

R flips it: 5 -> x.

It’s a tiny rebellion against how we think.

📜 Poetry in binary?

Victor Pelevin once joked about writing poems in assembly — “fewer rhyming problems in binary.” A wink at the myth that poetry needs rhymes. (It doesn’t. Ask the Japanese or ancient Greeks.)

🎭 Esoteric languages: beauty without utility

These are languages built not to solve problems, but to amuse, provoke, and confuse.

1. Perligata — code in Latin

No fixed word order. Declensions do the work.

nexto stringum reperimentum da = assign to $next the position in a string.

Free order, just like Latin poetry. The creator: “If you ask ‘Why?’ – the answer won’t make sense anyway.”

Pure humanities fuel.

2. Shakespeare — programs as Elizabethan plays

Variables are characters (Romeo, Juliet).

Logic is hidden in dialogue: “Thou art as villainous as the square root of Romeo!”

It can only add, subtract, and print. But it looks like a postmodern play.

💡 Why this matters for devs

Because not every line of code needs to ship to production. Sometimes you write for the weird joy of it. These languages remind us that programming is also a form of expression — absurd, beautiful, and deeply human.

“If you have to ask ‘Why?’, then the answer probably won’t make any sense to you either.”

Enjoyed this? Share with a colleague who secretly writes poetry in their comments. Or someone who still thinks Latin is useless. 😉

A Skeptical Review of Critical Code Studies

Boris Orekhov — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 04:45:00 +0000

Is Code Really a “Social Text”? A Skeptical Review of Critical Code Studies

TL;DR: A sharp academic review takes aim at Mark C. Marino’s Critical Code Studies (MIT Press, 2020). The verdict? Lots of hype, some interesting cases, but little real code analysis. If you’re a programmer who rolls your eyes at postmodern buzzwords, this one’s for you.

📖 The Book in a Nutshell

Marino argues that code has escaped the programmer’s dungeon and entered mainstream culture. Code is no longer just a tool – it’s a social text whose meaning changes with every new reader (lawyers, poets, activists, etc.). The book promises a literary‑style reading of software, drawing on postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory.

🔍 What the Review Says (Boris Orekhov, Digital Humanities, 2026)

Me, Boris Orekhov - a digital humanities scholar - is not impressed. My main gripes:

Overblown claims – “Audience of code has exploded!” Really? When was the last time a climate change debate hinged on reading source code? I call it cherry‑picking.
Case‑dropping, not analysis – We get anecdotes: a protest sign in C, a feminist PHP app, the Transborder Immigrant Tool. But actual code examination is superficial. A license phrase (“no warranties”) is noted as tragicomic – that’s about it.
Lost the plot – Marino sets up a story about two programmers competing for a job, then… never finishes it. This happens every 10‑15 pages.
Postmodern catechism – The book wears its ideology on its sleeve (postcolonial, queer, feminist). Fine, but it substitutes slogans for rational argument. Systematic methodology? Nowhere.
Missing prior work – My own 2015 paper on code as poetry, and Black’s 2015 Mozilla history (which does a real textual analysis), are ignored.

🤖 The Elephant in the Room: LLMs

The book was written when only humans wrote code. Now LLMs generate code without intention or social context. That guts Marino’s entire framework of authorial social meaning.

🎯 Final Verdict

“This book is less a scientific study and more a cabinet of curiosities – or a postmodern art exhibit catalog dressed as a monograph.”

It might find its audience, but don’t expect a toolkit for actually reading code.

👩‍💻 Why Should Programmers Care?

Because the gap between how we write code and how humanities scholars talk about it is huge. This review gives you an honest, critical look at one of the most hyped books in “software studies.” You’ll learn:

Why calling code a “text” is both obvious and misleading
Why social‑justice lenses often skip the actual for loops
What happens when ideology meets semicolons

And you’ll get a good laugh at academic overreach.

📄 Read the Full Review (PDF)

👉 Critical Code Studies review – Orekhov 2026

📚 Cite the Original Review

APA

Orekhov, B. (2026). Рецензия на книгу Марка К. Марино «Критические исследования кода» [Review of Critical Code Studies, by M. C. Marino]. Цифровые гуманитарные исследования, (1), 114–121. https://doi.org/10.31860/cgi-2026-1-114-121

MLA

Orekhov, Boris. “Рецензия на книгу Марка К. Марино «Критические исследования кода».” Review of Critical Code Studies, by Mark C. Marino. Цифровые гуманитарные исследования, no. 1, 2026, pp. 114–121. DOI: 10.31860/cgi-2026-1-114-121.

Chicago

Orekhov, Boris. “Рецензия на книгу Марка К. Марино «Критические исследования кода».” Review of Critical Code Studies, by Mark C. Marino. Цифровые гуманитарные исследования 1 (2026): 114–121. https://doi.org/10.31860/cgi-2026-1-114-121.

BibTeX

@review{Orekhov2026code,
  title = {Рецензия на книгу Марка К. Марино «Критические исследования кода»},
  author = {Орехов, Борис},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.31860/cgi-2026-1-114-121},
  journal = {Цифровые гуманитарные исследования},
  number = {1},
  pages = {114--121}
}

💬 Let’s Discuss

Have you read Critical Code Studies? Do you think code has a “social life” beyond its function? Drop your take in the comments – and share this post if you want more honest, no‑BS book reviews for devs.

CriticalCodeStudies #BookReview #SoftwareStudies #Programming #DigitalHumanities

Poetry in Code

Boris Orekhov — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 04:08:00 +0000

Poetry in Code: When Code Becomes Poetry

Have you ever written poetry in Java? Or C++? It turns out there’s a whole genre at the intersection of programming and poetry — code poetry. Not just poems about computers or programmers, but actual executable programs that are also poetic texts.

Ten years ago I published a paper proposing a method for analysing such works. Here are the key ideas — I think the dev.to community will find them interesting.

What is it?

Imagine writing code in Java, Python, or even CSS — it runs and works. But at the same time, the source code itself reads like a poem: rhythm, metre, imagery.

Here’s an example from Habr (2013):

if (newGame) resources.free();

s = FILENAME + 3;

setLocation(); load(s);

loadDialog.process();

try { setGamerColor(RED); }
catch(Exception e) { reset(); }

while (notReady) { object.make();
  if (resourceNotFound) break; }

byte result; // change to int!

music();

System.out.print("");

This Java code can be compiled and executed. And when read aloud, it follows a strict trochaic tetrameter. The author deliberately arranged the accents so that the rhythm aligns with the poetic metre.

How to classify such works?

In the paper I proposed three main analytical criteria:

1. Programming language choice

High‑level languages (Python, PHP, Perl) — closer to humans, accessible to a wider audience.
Low‑level languages (assembly) — elitist, requiring deep expertise.
Dead languages (Pascal, Cobol) — like Latin poetry, archaic.

Example from a Stanford poetry slam (C++):

class For_every {
public:
  void ngular(){cout << endl << "I";};
  void que(){cout<<"f";};
  void ng(){cout<<"w";};
  void ghting(){cout << "d";};
  void ving(){cout << "e";};
  void on(){cout << " n";};
};

int main() {
  For_every i;
  i.ngular(); i.quet(); i.ng();
  i.ving(); i.ghting();
  i.vidual(); i.on();
}

Thanks to variable names (i, us) and method names, the sequence produces a phrase: "I fought we will surely seperately" — the theme of “I vs. we”.

2. Functional load

What does the program do? Even if pragmatically “useless”, the program’s intended behaviour matters.

Example: an infinite loop in C as a metaphor for addiction:

void addiction() {
  int mind = 1;
  while (true) {
    mind = mind + 1;
    if (mind < 0) break;
  }
}

An infinite loop is usually considered a bug, but here it becomes an artistic device.

3. Dependence on natural language

Can code poetry avoid relying on English? That’s the holy grail. Most authors use English words as variable names — e.g., an SQL query:

INSERT ‘your hand’ INTO ‘mine’
SELECT ‘restaurant’ FROM ‘nearby’
WHERE ‘you would’ LIKE ‘to date’;

This is essentially English wrapped in SQL syntax. But if one could express meaning purely through the programming language itself (without borrowed natural language) — that would be a new art form, understandable to any developer regardless of their mother tongue.

Not just “normal” languages

At the Code Poetry Slam (Stanford, 2013–2015), even non‑Turing‑complete languages like CSS or lists of HTTP status codes are accepted.

For example:

201 created
200 OK
100 continue
303 see other
302 found
409 conflict
403 forbidden
520 origin error
...

These are Apache web server response codes. But arranged like this, they evoke a lyrical mood — reminiscent of human life with its errors, redirects, and successes.

Or CSS:

.ocean {
  color: cornflowerblue;
  pitch: high;
  overflow: visible;
}
.boat {
  color: firebrick;
  transform: rotate(94deg);
  float: none;
}
.rescue-team {
  visibility: visible;
}

That’s already a narrative about a capsized boat and a rescue team.

What’s next?

I think this practice is more than a hype. Behind it are:

therapeutic relief (programmers unwind through creativity);
carnivalisation of professional language;
the search for new expressive means.

Of course, when the element of contrast wears off, the wave may subside. But for now, such texts keep appearing, and a subculture has already formed around them. Over time, researchers will amass a whole corpus of “poetic programs”.

Link to the full paper

If you want to dive deeper, here’s the PDF (in Russian, but with an English abstract and plenty of code examples):

🔗 https://nevmenandr.github.io/portfolio/assets/pdf/21.pdf

APA citation:

Orekhov, B. (2016). Stikhi v programmnom kode: sovremennyy opyt i metodika analiza [Poetry in program code: Contemporary experience and analysis methods]. Kritika i Semiotika, (2), 94–101. https://nevmenandr.github.io/portfolio/assets/pdf/21.pdf

BibTeX citation:

@article{Orekhov2015programmpoetry,
  title = {Стихи в программном коде: современный опыт и методика анализа},
  author = {Орехов, Борис},
  year = {2016},
  journal = {Критика и семиотика},
  number = {2},
  pages = {94--101},
  issn = {2307-1737},
  keywords = {poetry discourse, poetic text analysis, programming languages}
}

Let me know in the comments — have you ever tried writing “code poetry”? Or do you know other examples? 👨‍💻📜

Verse Markup Language (VML)

Boris Orekhov — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 04:02:53 +0000

Verse Markup Language (VML): When Poetry Meets Code

Have you ever tried to make a computer understand a poem? Not just find rhymes, but parse where the author is, where the title is, where the epigraph is, and where the actual verses are? If so, you know how quickly “plain text” becomes a headache.

I’m Boris Orekhov, and I created VML (Verse Markup Language) — a minimalist markup language that turns the chaos of poetic text into a machine-readable structure. And yes, it’s already working on real‑world corpora (e.g., the Bashkir Poetry Corpus with >10,000 poems).

A note on language: The full VML specification is written in Russian. However, given the current state of machine translation (DeepL, GPT-4, etc.), this is hardly a barrier. Anyone can obtain an accurate, readable English version in seconds. The tag names and syntax are language-agnostic anyway — <a>, <&>, <n> work the same in any idiom.

Why not TEI, JSON, or Markdown?

TEI – a beast. It can handle anything, but marking up a single poem feels like writing a new gospel in XML. Impossible for handling for humanists.
JSON – great for machines, but a humanist will close their laptop in horror.
Markdown – fine for documentation, but not for strict metadata markup.

VML is a text format that stays human‑readable and is easy to parse. Its tags are short (<a>, <&>, <n>, <rm>), the hierarchy is strict, and learning it takes 5 minutes.

Minimal example

<a> William Blake
<&> Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

<a> – author (stays active until the next <a>)
<&> – the first line of the poem (incipit). Without it, the document is invalid.

From this you can already extract the author, the title (none here), the list of lines, and even count them.

Adding structure

<a> Emily Dickinson
<rm> Hope is the thing with feathers   <-- epigraph (prose insert)
<&> “Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
<*> And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

<rm> – prose insert (epigraph, dedication, stage direction). Each line gets its own <rm>. Poetry parser skips it.
<*> – start of a stanza. Stanzas are separated by repeated <*>.

Poetry cycles

<nn> Sonnets to the Young Man
<n> Sonnet 1
<&> From fairest creatures we desire increase...
<n> Sonnet 2
<&> When forty winters shall beseige thy brow...
</nn>

<nn> ... </nn> – a cycle. Inside are several poems, each with its own title <n> and incipit <&>.

What if an epigraph appears before an incipit without a title?

Two poems in a row, and the second has an epigraph. How do you avoid attaching the epigraph to the first poem? VML provides <&&> – an explicit start of a new poem before an incipit:

<a> John Keats
<&> A thing of beauty is a joy for ever...
...
<&&>
<rm> Epigraph to “Ode to a Nightingale”
<rm> “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!”
<&> My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains...

For the geeks: “ladder” layout

If you’re a verse scholar, you might need explicit “ladder” markup:

For example Mayakovsky:

<&> Я волком бы <l-2> выгрыз <l-3> бюрократизм.

Tools

The repository contains:

Validator (vml_validator.py) – checks syntax, nesting, escaping.
Counter (vml_counter.py) – outputs statistics: authors, poems, lines, cycles.

python3 vml_validator.py poem.vml
python3 vml_counter.py poem.vml

Where is it already used?

Bashkir Poetry Corpus (http://web-corpora.net/bashcorpus/) – more than 10,000 poems marked up in VML. Based on this corpus, a monograph (Orekhov, 2019) and several articles on quantitative verse studies have been published.

Who is it for?

Humanists who want to build their own corpus without learning XML/JSON.
Developers who need to extract metadata from poems for NLP tasks (author, date, metre, stanza structure).
Digital Humanities enthusiasts looking for a simple, open standard.

Biblio

Orekhov, B. V. (2019). Bashkirskiy stikh XX veka. Korpusnoye issledovaniye [Bashkir Verse of the 20th Century: A Corpus Study]. Saint Petersburg: Aleteya. 344 p. ISBN 978-5-907189-29-4. (In Russian)

P.S. What about escaping?

In real poems, sequences like <a> almost never appear as part of the text. But just in case, escaping exists: \<a> will be treated as plain <a> and won’t break the parser.

Discussion in the comments is welcome. Do you use any formats for poetry markup? Would you like to try VML? Feel free to open issues on GitHub – any feedback is valuable.

Boris Orekhov, 2026

Programming as text creation

Boris Orekhov — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 07:45:26 +0000

I am a philologist and I need to write texts: scientific papers, popularization articles. But sometimes I want to write code. I often treat code as natural language texts. Just as sometimes you want to try your hand at a new genre, you want to leave behind and offer the community code in a programming language that is not your primary language.

I used to write a lot in Perl, it was my second language, but now I've thoroughly forgotten it. However, for sentimental reasons I'd like to have Perl code in my github account, so I had to remember it.

I tried using ChatGPT to accomplish the task I wanted, but never got the results I wanted. I had to write code the old fashioned way and work out the rules of the language.

I plan to write some more applications (useful and just beautiful) in different programming languages in the near future and make them available to the public.

Font licensing

Boris Orekhov — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 09:29:00 +0000

A few years ago I created a font.

I would like it to be open and free for distribution. This is unusual because most fonts are paid for. I was faced with the problem of choosing a license for the font. Fonts have their own licenses, and they are not supposed to be free to distribute. It seemed appropriate to me to use a license that included the font as part of the software, because fonts are now electronic and used on websites.

In general, I would like to use the GNU General Public License v3.0 (+ Commercial use, + Distribution, √ License and copyright notice, √ Same license), but I haven't seen such cases, it doesn't seem to be common.

Possible topics for Python podcast

Boris Orekhov — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 00:12:00 +0000

I taught programming to humanities students for many years. This is also something we can sometimes talk about within the programming community.

What can you focus on in such a conversation?

Here's an outline for a conversation plan:

Why should humanities students learn python? Common problems that are solved by code.
Why Python and not R or Fortran? What libraries are in demand for humanitarians?
What are the differences in learning to develop for humanitarians, what are the challenges faced? Language barrier.
Does GPT work? What do the humanities think about it?
Esoteric programming languages from a humanist's point of view
Poems in programming code
What do natural language and programming language have in common? Python as a foreign language

Scientific problems are not real problems for programmers

Boris Orekhov — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 00:02:00 +0000

In 2020, a rather famous person wrote to me through one service for sharing scientific papers. This person is a programmer.

First, she asked about the Master's program at our university, whether it was worth going there. We also talked about the website that this person had created. The site is very famous and useful.
Then, as part of my reflections, I suggested thinking about adding some functionality to this site. This functionality would have to be at the backend level, and would require the implementation of free third-party libraries.

This idea seemed unfortunate to my interlocutor. She did not want to implement any third-party code. But the main thing is that I heard a number of insults against me. According to her, I did not understand the subject of the conversation.

To show that I had studied the subject of the conversation, I went to the site and, opening the source code of the page, discovered the use of jQuery there.

In my opinion, this was already an implementation of someone else's library. To this I received an even greater stream of insults.

One of the ways to hurt me, which my interlocutor chose, was to attack my abilities as a programmer. “You are not a real programmer, you just use programming for your small scientific tasks, and you don't understand anything”.

This is true, by the way, I am not a real programmer and I write academic code which is much worse in quality than the one created in the industry.

But the most interesting thing here is the contrast between my “little science tasks” and the apparently big and serious stuff that programming is actually for.

DEV Community: Boris Orekhov

Chess & Computer Tech Today – A Programmer’s Take

Chess & Computer Tech Today – A Programmer’s Take

1. Analysis engines – the real MVP

2. Cheating – from SMS to… sex toys?

3. Online chess – pre-moves, flag-hunting, and lag

Why it matters for devs

Combinatorics of Beads

🧩 Combinatorics of Beads: When Tang Poetry Meets Chess in Python

🎯 The Rules (such as they are)

🐍 Show Me the Code

📜 Before & After (with Machine Translation)

♟️ Why Programmers Will Love This

🧠 The Bigger Picture

📦 Get It / Try It

🎼 “Let it resound in our games, in our whole life, in everything we create and endure!”

When Code Speaks Latin and Acts Like Shakespeare

When Code Speaks Latin and Acts Like Shakespeare Or why programmers secretly love useless beauty

🧠 Natural languages vs. code

🔁 The assignment quirk

📜 Poetry in binary?

🎭 Esoteric languages: beauty without utility

1. Perligata — code in Latin

2. Shakespeare — programs as Elizabethan plays

💡 Why this matters for devs

A Skeptical Review of Critical Code Studies

Is Code Really a “Social Text”? A Skeptical Review of Critical Code Studies

📖 The Book in a Nutshell

🔍 What the Review Says (Boris Orekhov, Digital Humanities, 2026)

🤖 The Elephant in the Room: LLMs

🎯 Final Verdict

👩‍💻 Why Should Programmers Care?

📄 Read the Full Review (PDF)

📚 Cite the Original Review

APA

MLA

Chicago

BibTeX

💬 Let’s Discuss

CriticalCodeStudies #BookReview #SoftwareStudies #Programming #DigitalHumanities

Poetry in Code

Poetry in Code: When Code Becomes Poetry

What is it?

How to classify such works?

1. Programming language choice

2. Functional load

3. Dependence on natural language

Not just “normal” languages

What’s next?

Link to the full paper

Verse Markup Language (VML)

Verse Markup Language (VML): When Poetry Meets Code

Why not TEI, JSON, or Markdown?

Minimal example

Adding structure

Poetry cycles

What if an epigraph appears before an incipit without a title?

For the geeks: “ladder” layout

Tools

Where is it already used?

Who is it for?

Links

Biblio

P.S. What about escaping?

Programming as text creation

Font licensing

Possible topics for Python podcast

Scientific problems are not real problems for programmers