Slashdot Mirror
Is Programming Art?
chromatic writes "A constant question for software developers is 'What is the nature of programming?' Is it art or science? Does creativity or engineering lead the design and implementation of a program? John Littler talked to several well-known and well-respected programmers (including Guido van Rossum, Andy Hunt, Bjarne Stroustrup, Paul Graham, and Richard Stallman) to find their answers; he shares their thoughts and his own in Art and Computer Programming." From the article: "What the heck is art anyway, at least as most people understand it? What do people mean when they say 'art'? A straw poll showed a fair degree of consensus--art is craft plus a special degree of inspiration. This pretty much explains immediately why only art students and art critics at a certain sort of paper favor conceptual art. Conceptual art, of course, often lacks a craft component as people usually understand the term."
I think Richard Stallman put it quite nicely:
"I would describe programming as a craft, which is a kind of art, but not a fine art. Craft means making useful objects with perhaps decorative touches. Fine art means making things purely for their beauty."
When you have to take functionality into account, it often kills the artistic side of the creation.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
What a load of pseudo-intellectual drivel. Coders do what they must to get the job done. Some because it's a job and some because they love it.
It's like a janitor contemplating whether a clean hall is art. Why not spend your time examining better methods of developing portable/maintainable code or something. I mean really, let's say you get your answer. "It is art" or "It isn't art", what has been accomplished other than the ability to puff up about what you do?
This is no different than a bunch of tools contemplating what makes them l337.
BTW I'm not arguing for or against whether it is art. I strike only on the sillyness of the question.
For me, art must express some level of emotion. Good art communicates that which cannot be said.
While Windows sometimes makes me cry, to what degree does programming convey emotion?
Same as usual, a bridge can be beautiful to look at, beautiful in how it copes with it's load etc, same as code, it's just people don't like looking at code as engineering for some reason.
If a well-composed essay is a form of art... I would have to say an efficient program is certainly a form of art.
... you have very few who understand it... and not a lot of people who care a lick about it.
You just have to remember the appeal of art of this sort is MUCH smaller... you need to understand it to really enjoy it... and unlike abstract art or modern art (where very few understand it and very many say they do)
So, yes, it is an art form... for a very small subset of the population.
My two cents, anyway...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Load up the cannons -- here's the perfect slashdot story: programming art or science?
That's like a story that's titled, "Chocolate Ice Cream, better than Vanilla?"
Art is subjective. If you believe that some part of science is subjective as well, then you understand that there is no easy answer to the question posed. If you think science has no subjectivity, then welcome to the food fight!
Quality: It's a Numbers Game
Art is aesthetic, not useful. While you can use those aesthetics for a useful purpose (e.g. selling it to people who appreciate those aesthetics), that doesn't mean it's intrinsically useful.
Programming is a craft. It is useful, which distinguishes it from art. A certain sense of aesthetics, skill and experience is necessary to program effectively, which distinguishes it from merely being a profession.
Computer science- the concepts of bits and bytes and memory addresses is a science. There is a right and wrong answer for pretty much everything. Its researchable and falsifiable.
The design of a computer program is an art. There is no defined standard for what is or is not good design, its not falsifiable. And its not something that can be taught by rote in a college course. Picking the right design for your specifications and requirements is an art, and one that too few people really understand.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Similarly, designing a complex system looks to an outsider like merely writing one line of code after another. It is only when you step back and see how the lines of code merge into a subroutine, and subroutines coalesce into cogent modules, and these modules get connected together to become a useful system that you can see the art. One square centimeter of yellow paint is not art, that square in the middle of one piece in a series of paintings on a theme is.
There are a lot more housepainters than artists. There are a lot more coders than there are hackers.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
I agree. I feel that even the most menial chore can be done artistically. And there is a certain "art" to making code elegant and functional. The same applies to math, science and other highly techical things.
The belief that you know a thing is a most perfect way to prevent learning.
from wikipedia:
"Mathematical rigour is often cited as a kind of gold standard for mathematical proof. It has a history, being traced back to Greek mathematics, where it is said to have been invented. Complete rigour, it is often said, became available in mathematics at the start of the twentieth century. This relies on the axiomatic method, and the subsequent development of pure mathematics under the axiomatic umbrella. With the aid of computers, it is possible to check proofs mechanically; throwing the possible flaws back onto machine errors that are considered unlikely events. Indeed, mathematical rigour may be defined as amenability to algorithmic checking of correctness. Formal rigour is the introduction of high degrees of completeness by means of a formal language. Most mathematical arguments are presented as prototypes of formally rigorous proofs, on the grounds that too much formality may in fact obscure what is being said."
Robustness
from wikipedia:
"In computing terms, robustness is reliability or being available seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Robustness is an important characterists of the internet because network design is a key factor in the availability of data."
This also can translate into portability.
Elegance
from wikipedia:
"The proof of a mathematical theorem is considered elegant if it is surprisingly simple yet effective and constructive; similarly, a computer program or algorithm is elegant if it uses a small amount of intuitive code to great effect."
Euclidean Geometry was long thought to demonstrate all three qualities. If one wants to attribute art to elegance then programming can be said to be art.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
B.) Like artists there appear to be quite a number of programmers that insist on making true crap and calling it "programing", while only a few make truly good programs.
C.) and like art many people seem to actively pursue the work of some of these programmers and place high values on their works. However, they do so with little regard as to weather the works belong to the "crap" or the "skilled" categories.
Keep in mind that for every Monet, there's half a dozen Thomas Kincaides.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
A constant question for software developers is 'What is the nature of programming?' Is it art or science?
Maybe I am a strange software developer, but these are not the questions going on through my mind at night. Maybe "how can I improve the design" or "what does the customer really want from this product" but usually it's "how can I get that cute girl back to my place". Seriously though, these people have too much time on their hands. I didn't RTFA, so it may be brilliant. But programming is definitely a science. The thing is, that as programmers, we can recognize beauty in the design and implementation of a program. In that sense, to us, it can be beautiful. We might say the programmer is so good that he is an artist. But this is true in any field. We have someone install our networks and truly, he is an artist. He takes the spaghetti of thousands of cables and makes it so neat and logical it would make an artist weep. But is it art? No...that's a stupid question.
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People who come to enjoy programming, in my experience, come from all sorts of backgrounds. I have met coders who were formerly big into music, or poetry, or photography, etc. I myself was a psych major (albeit a CS minor), which might explain my interface-nazi tendencies with regards to UI design ;) I couldn't be a CS major because I kept messing up ::cough:: flunking ::cough:: my "weedout" engineering calc classes (which were a CS requirement at my school), but in hindsight, I liked being able to take lots of electives. So, although I would be at a loss to create a new useful compression algorithm, and am probably not the BEST programmer out there, i really like to design and develop nice code/nice backend database schemas, that result in something that someone thinks is kickass.
;) So I can actually document my own stuff pretty well, and I've been client-facing for a while so I know how to write courteous emails with lots of e-business-speak... ;)
;)
;)
;)
Unlike a lot of coder geeks I know, though, I got A's in advanced english classes, AND art classes
My boss at my former job used to play football and now codes. Can you imagine?!?! Football! While I spent summers geeking out, he was learning what a button-hook was. The horror. lol. (i pretty much have zero interest in sports. it seems like a lot of pointy-haired types do, though. oh well, to each his own)
Meanwhile, the two coders I know who I used to secretly idolize because they actually WERE cs majors, got tired of coding and are now both getting MBA's (which seems like a boring thing to do, were I to do it). Their complaint was that coders get shit on at corporate jobs, and they were just tired of the whole design/code/test/deploy/debug/support cycle.
Screw 'em, they also liked football
I know what they're talking about in the former case of feeling taken-advantage of (not to mention that I am TIRED, TIRED of working with Microsoft-only technology, from an ideological/stuck-in-the-Microsoft-bubble standpoint!), and my solution to that is probably going to happen soon. Take my savings, quit my corporate job (which has done nothing for my technical development lately) and code freelance for a while. Wish me luck (I'm a little nervous), I have a few ideas and I'll be starting by diving headfirst into Ruby/Rails and seeing where that takes me
Perhaps I'll never be a millionaire (or perhaps I will), but building stuff (the craft of it, and the type of creativity required at times) that someone else thinks is cool really floats my boat.
Who cares what programming "is", as long as people stop frickin' stereotyping us. The only thing that all programmers have in common, is that they program. The rest of it, like the difficulty in dating the opposite sex, is just positive correlation
I believe that computer programming is like brick-and-mortar architecture.
The vast majority of buildings are just buildings. But every once in a while, a building is a work of art.
One of the things I like about architecture (and computer programming) is that the buildings always serve a purpose. They don't arise out of the ether to express a purely abstract thought, but arise from the need to create something useful.
But don't delude yourself by thinking that you're an artist just because you're a computer programmer. The vast majority of buildings are cinder-block, minimum-cost affairs, and the same is true for code.
Mozart considered composition a craft. So did Bach, who regularly turned out a new cantata most weeks for his job at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. The notion that artists have special access to some emotional content not available to ordinary craftsmen is a nineteenth-century idea. But everyone agrees that both Mozart and Bach had access to some pretty unusual stuff- we hear it and respond to it.
The content of programming is perhaps too instrumental (i.e., interesting for its usefulness more than its inherent qualities) to rise to the level of art. But this may be changing with the state-of-the-art games. In a hundred years, people may look back at today's game developers as the inventors of a new art form!
Art is anything people make. Which really means any change people make in any medium. Craft is a kind of art: more functional than representational. Good art is just art that I like.
--
make install -not war
Several years later, I went back to college, this time studying graphic design and illustration, with a foundation of ye olde fine arts thrown in. I was only mildly surprised to have an instructor start talking about the Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Section. It learned that there are even objective and verifiable standards for what humans usually perceive as "balanced", "unsettling", and even "beautiful". This doesn't mean that art can be verified quantifiably, but it does mean it isn't 100% subjective, either. (Rob Liefeld is a bad artist. Full stop.)
"What is art?" is a subject that will get even art students into heated debate with each other. But if you include architecture and poetry (and I think most people would), then programming has to be at least within the grey fringe.
Personally, I don't care much for attempts to distinguish between (for example) fine art, commercial art, design, craft, etc. Part of that's because I took classes that arguably included each of these, and what I was doing in one or another them wasn't fundamentally different. My art school has majors in Furniture Design, Sculpture, Illustration, Photography, Painting, Interior Design, Graphic Design, etc. and hardly anyone around here tries to separate them into categories of craft/art/design etc.
There's art in science; there's science in art. That's certainly the way Leondardo approached his life's work, and it's how I try to approach mine.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
elegent code structures destroyed in the Core Wars, slashdotted into non-existence, their crystalline object orientated shells collapsing from the fires of method calls overloaded to the point of breaking.
And I've also seen rusting hulks of code, slapped together with variable names like A1, A2, A3, A4 - used for text, numeric, array, and object types at the same time.
Programming is an Art and a Science. Darned few artists out there at the best of times, and not that many scientists either, sadly.
Will in Seattle
And as a programmer (the black sheep of the family), I strongly believe that programming is an art form. The article talks about finding examples of software that are "art"... but I think every instance of programming is art. I recently got into a fairly in-depth discussion about this topic: Programming: Technical or Artistic. I think one very interesting point is that both software and "normal" art have an audience. The programmer creates a work of art in the medium of a programming language and a physical computer system. The audience, the customer/user of the created software system, may appreciate the software or not: there is no objective measure to say that software is "correct". Software, like art, does what it does, and the audience determines its value, beauty, utility, and esthetics.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
With 100% pure functionality (and pure ugly) at one end ... ... ...
functionality mixed with aesthetics in the middle
And at the other end, 100% pure aesthetics with no functionality (apart for the materials used).
Of course, why limit it to one dimension? How about 2 dimensions (a square). In one corner, a bad woodworker who is also a bad artist will make a crappy, ugly chair.
In the opposite corner, you have a very skilled woodworker who is also a very good artist who makes a very beautiful, yet very functional chair.
In the other corners are a bad-woodworker but good good-artist and a good-woodworker but bad-artist.
Why can't something be both science and art?
I'd suggest that the word 'craft' is the best chosen, because when I see really good code, it's like looking at really good craftmanship.
The difference is that a painting is not as easily changed as a computer program. So the program may evolve toward perfection (refactoring) over time, while the painting only has one shot at it. But then, when you consider it, they are all perfect...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
> I don't have a degree. But seriously just what does having that piece of paper mean in an industry that can change many times a year.
I still can't get the scriptmonkeys around here to grasp the notion of structured programming, let alone OO or functional. The state of the art does not evolve as much as the industry likes to pretend it does. Just because they rev the apps every couple years does not mean the whole industry changes.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
I think the central problem is the misguided assumption that art, craft and science are mutually exclusive, as are beauty and utility. As some have already stated, there can be beauty in functional things: the Lamboghini Countach, the SR-71 Blackbird, the Golden Gate Bridge. Leonardo da Vinci is considered among the greatest artists, and yet he was a scientist, inventor and engineer. There is such a thing as beautiful code, programs which can be considered art. Not everybody can appreciate them, just as not everybody appreciates the beauty of a fugue, a poem, a painting or an essay. Most programmers write code to simply fulfill specifications, but the artists among us fulfill those specifications with beautiful code. Therein lies our art.
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
I think for our own sense of self worth most of us try and produce code that could be considered art, or at least artful. However most of us are constrained by talent, time and our beloved clients.
I have been programming for about 17 years and my background is mechanical engineering. For many years I saw programming as the kind of thing a technician does. A technician is a guy of at least some intelligence with the proper training and experience. He gets the job done. The funny thing is that as years passed I never changed my basic opinion on the job as a whole.
Then one day my boss was chewing my ass off for God knows why, and he complained that the problem with programmers is that they are artists and that opens a huge can of worms. We argued about it for a while but he left me convinced that yes, real programmers are artists, not technicians.
When was the last time you read a bit of hacked together code that looked so nasty that it made you smile? Sure, it looked like hell, but it got the job done. You could probably recognize who actually wrote that particular piece of code because eventually the great programmers develop their own particular style.
When was the last time you read a tiny little bit of code, a really small function that did just one lousy little thing, but not only it did the job, but it took you a split second to figure out what the hell the programmer was thinking when he/she wrote it? That's art.
If programming was purely technical, then we would never get into the zone in the middle of the god damn night, or solve a problem while in the can or taking a shower.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Coding is technical. User interface is an art, debugging is an art, optimization is an art.
Play Command HQ online
In truth, art today has merged with marketing and advertising. To be an artist today is to be a master of communication, a master networker.
The question is not is programming art but rather can somebody convince you that programming is art.
The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on.
Sorry to enter this so late, but,
Art is about context, not about materials or even content.
I both program and I've recently graduated with a degree in Painting and Drawing.
Dada Mail - Program, Art Project or Absurdity?
The only thing "artistic" about art is the decision what to be "artistic" about. Everything else is engineering - putting together known quantities of known materials to generate a desired effect.
HOW you put together those materials - say, for least cost to greatest effect - might be imaginative, but it's still engineering in my view.
Any programmer who think he's doing "art" is probably a piss-poor programmer - and probably has never documented a single program in his life.
Which is just about every programmer I've ever known, seen, heard about or read about.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!