One might think that teaching programming to beginners is only beneficial for the learners. It turns out that explaining programming in basic terms has side-effects on the teacher. The difficulties the novices encounter are often just symptoms of deeper issues. Therefore the instructor is forced to (re-)consider fundamental questions. What is programming? Where does the difficulty come from? What is a `natural' programming concept? It is impossible to teach without having some answers (admittedly or not) to these philosophical questions.

The 'Poetry of Programming' is a course about the functional core of Clojure, designed for Liberal Arts students with no prior coding experience (https://egri-nagy.github.io/popbook/). It is in its third semester, so it has provided ample opportunities for the above philosophical reflections. The talk will go through the insights gained from running the course. These will be presented through code examples from the classroom, keeping the high-flying general ideas close to everyday programming.

The content will be interesting for anyone who is - engaged in teaching/learning functional programming, - puzzled about the nature of programming or the relationship between mathematics and programming, - willing to have a closer look at functional programming concepts and techniques.