2005-09-01

A diamond-shaped poem on XML schema languages

First, here's the poem:

WXS:
Complex, inflexible,
Boggling, wearying, proliferating,
Circumscribed, inadequate. Future-proofed, compartmentalized,
Systematizing, pleasing, sufficing,
Straightforward, simplified --
RNG!

The constraints on this kind of poem is that there are seven lines: lines 1 and 7 contain one noun, lines 2 and 6 contain two adjectives, lines 3 and 5 contain three present participles, and line 4 contains four past participles. I cheated slightly: inadequate is derived from a Latin past participle.

I decided to add a syllabic constraint as well: the syllable lengths in each line are 3, 6, 10, 15, 10, 6, 3, corresponding to a binomial distribution.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

And you posted it at exactly midnight! Probably at pi over root two seconds after the hour.