Where Is The Line Between Programmer And Artist?

frinsore asks: "What jobs are programmers and what are artists? Game creation seems to have blurred the line between the two. While some fall easily into either side, others don't. Where does the map creator fall? They have to know what the engine can do and how the user can interact with it, they also have to make it look pretty and keep it challenging. What about interface design? Giving users as much access as possible while not overwhelming them with details. Do these people land into one camp or another or are they some where in the middle?" This a difficult question to answer and it entirely hinges on how you define art. For me, a piece of code, or an elegant mathematical proof is as much art as a Picasso, or Beethoven's 5th Symphony. As always, feel free to share your thoughts on this subject.

Comments

This is masturbatory

[the red pen]

Oh puh-leez. This is really just a "Programmers: Are we cool or what?" dicusssion. Yeah, programming is cool, but real art appeals to people who aren't artists. If you want to be an artist be an artist. If your self-esteem needs proping up, get therapy.

Creativity more than just Art

[sacherjj]

I am a Electrical and Computer Engineer. What I found most interesting attending an Engineering College, was the diversity and great creativity of the better engineering students. Many played music, were great artists, or very accoplished writers. Any type of engineering is an art. You have a fixed set of tools and must create something from those limitations. Programing IS art, when done right. This is the same with a brilliant bridge design or an elegant circuit design. All of these are forms of artistic expresion, IMHO.

Misunderstood art

[Bilestoad]

Yes code is art, but more often than not the wrong kind of code is seen as art. Some people think "art" is using every obscure language feature to pack as much as possible onto one line. Others think it is getting creative with the preprocessor. Usually these are kids who don't know the language and are still excited by newly discovered features.

If you don't have to think too hard about a piece of code to re-use it then it's art.

REAL art code is obvious, even to a VB programmer. Anyone can read it and understand it easily. It's efficient, but does not sacrifice readability for cycles unless it absolutely has to. And it even looks nice.

You are ignoring other important questions

[OlympicSponsor]

Like:

Where's the line between fish and fowl? (penguins)
Where's the line between hacker and cracker?
Where's the line between mother and non-? (host/surrogate/adopted mother)

You are confusing at least three different concepts. The first is "these two categories are so conceptually close that drawing a line between them is difficult" (hacker vs cracker). The second concept is "ill-defined categories" (fish, mother). The third "very different categories that contain many of the same members"--which concept applies to programmers and artists, I would argue.

Art is about conveying beauty and/or a message to an audience (sometimes just the artist himself).

Programming (and other mathematical/engineering disciplines) is about building useful structures. The humans doing the building may be partially guided by artistic concerns, but that doesn't make the output "art". The primary purpose is "does it work" not "is it nice to look at" or even "is it elegant."

Just because the categories of "artist" and "programmers" contain many of the same members, doesn't automatically make the output of the Programmer class art any more than it makes the output of the Artist class software.
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