LSL Portal Poetry Project: Improving LSL documentation readability

When someone makes a post on April 1st, you get suspicious. When someone makes a post on April 1st that talks of haiku, poetry and the Linden Scripting Language, you get even more suspicious, even if the person is  Strife Onizuka, long time resident, one time moderator, long time scripting person. However it seems it’s actually a real project! Here are Strife’s words:

Hello. I’m Strife Onizuka, LSL Portal editor and scriptor. This being the start of the second quarter I come to you today to announce a new project I am spearheading, it’s goal is to make the documentation more accessible to a larger portion of the SL community.

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 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 realistate being at a premium haiku requires the minimum amount of space while packing the greatest metaphorical punch.

To illustrate, here is the haiku for llParticleSystem:

Cherry blossom sprites
alight upon fickle breezes
to fall through the ground.

For myself I had to had to have this haiku explained to me. It’s writer explained that the literary expert will be able to extract with great ease the following incites:

1. Particles in SecondLife are traditional 2D sprites often seen in may games.
2. That SecondLife not only has wind, which is a bit capricious, it has a full blown weather simulator.
3. That the particle system has no notion of clipping; particles will go through solid objects, including the ground.
4. The writer has a tabby that likes to sleep on the keyboard.

As always the LSL Portal needs volunteers. To give you an idea of what we need, some articles already have poems. You can find a list of them here: Articles with haiku

If you would like to help with this project, here are a list of LSL articles in need of haiku: Articles in need of haiku

If writing haiku isn’t where your strength lies (it sure isn’t mine) maybe consider writing examples or just generally expanding on what has already been written: LSL articles in need of an example

For those interested, the runner up to Haiku was Limerick but we had trouble rhyming anything with llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast.

As I said earlier, I thought this was an April fool, but it’s not.

Ok so you may have no interest in LSL, despite it being the language that runs Second Life, but you may like poetry and maybe, just maybe, if you create the poetry, you’ll understand the scripting and become an ace poet and scriptor.

This is a shared community project, where the poets and scriptors can join forces and become all powerful, fly down the chute and destroy the death star! … oh wait, I’m getting carried away. However it is a fun looking project.

Over at SLUniverse Strife adds more comments about 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?). The same applies for llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast (which now has it’s very own limerick!).

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 are you a poet, can you write limericks, Haiku and can you preserve the legacy of LSL past its sell by date with art?

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