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.
I'd say it is mostly science by nature, but you can make it into an art. You can make just about anything into an art with enough creativity. I can see how you might think it could be an art without doing anything special, but I feel it is a lot more technical.
Scott Simontis
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.
Programmers do meet one of the requirements that you have to meet to be considered an artist: They make no money.
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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/
In days gone bye, even science was considered an art form, but nowadays it's all science and the only artists left seem to be the people who once were musicians.
If Britney Spears can be referred to as an artist then gees, there's enough computer porn out there for programming to qualify as an art.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
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?
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/321a/
Now that code, is art. Most code is just craft, but to make a working perl program, that is an ascii-art of a camel, that is True Art..
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
There's just no one big bucket called "programming." To the extent that one's code interacts with, or communicates to a user, there's ample room for an artful implementation. Especially when the code's purpose is, through that interaction, to inform or pursuade. Yes, that's getting into "content" rather that programming, but the line between those is very, very fuzzy, especially in web development.
That being said, I think there's a certain intrinsic beauty to the way that I indent my subroutines.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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?
Bill Budge is not a well-remembered name, because his heyday was the Apple ][ era, and his masterwork was Pinball Construction Set (8-bit object oriented GUI).
But he did a couple of 6502 tutorials in an Apple magazine just before it went bankrupt (Softalk?), and the way he defined variables struck me as exactly like poetry-- he seemed to have meditated on the deep meaning long enough that he knew how to create exactly the right variables, and name them the right names.
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.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Hacking is an art. When some coder develops something in visual basic because he has been told too do so by his boss, and he gives a given ammount of work hours to finish it as fast as he can, it's usually not art. But when J.R. Hacker writes something in C & Asm just to see if he can actually do it, it's art, because of the motivations for developing the software, the hacker will try to make it as best as possible, and the reason to write many parts of the software will be to make it beatyful and elegant, not only in it's code, but while it runs, The same happends with any more conventional form of art, for example: Some teapot produced at a factory, where they will try to produce as many as possible, all equal, that ain't art, but if someone puts all it's effort into making a hand-make teapot, then it will be art.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I don't want to overstate the point--artistry is found in all forms of programming--but I think it's telling that the advocates of higher-level languages in the interview are more inclined to see programming as art.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Then the dot-com thing happened, and nobody differentiates someone with a mathematics or engineering degree and some kid with a "certification". The result? Lousy software for everyone!
That's why I left the field.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Computer science is something just like everything else. Seriously, get over yourself, you aren't that special. (And our generation isn't special for knowing about computers. Teenagers thought they were smarter than their parents/teachers long before they had computers.)
Now, computer science is an immature field, and has a long way to go. That means it has some challenges to go through as it develops. It also has a different front-end than other fields, sure. There are plenty of differences, but the basic challenges are the same in any design field, and writing programs is a design field. You have some requirements, some tools, some limitations, and you have to find the best way to make them all work together. You have a boss that doesn't understand exactly what you are doing. You have a customer that doesn't know what they want. You are trying to do something that has never been done before, but is based on something that has. Welcome to real life in most professions.
Other than that, I agree with you. A good design is a work of art, at least to those skilled enough to see it. Architects seek to make a building practical but beautiful. A mechanical clock can be amazing to watch. A well-written program is like poetry to read.
I think the first goal of any designer is to get the basics working so that they are in a position to work on the beauty of their design. Too often we are put in an awkward position and it's all we can do to make something that works, screw looking good.
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/
Improvisation may be an interesting way of producing pieces of immediate performance art in small forms. And it was considered an essential skill in music pedagogy through the eighteenth century. But it's the wrong way to write larger forms like symphonies. Large software systems are more like symphonies than jazz-sets. They require a lot of long-range planning. The great symphonists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had an incredible gift for long-range thinking, combined with an unbelieveable ability to keep all of a large production in their heads. Here's a possible clue to the required mental equipment: there are anecdotes about most of the the great composers regarding their prodigious, almost inhuman memory-power.
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.
The US Supreme Court made a definitive ruling on the definition of art in the 1929 case Brancusi vs. US Treasury Dept.
Constantin Brancusi imported his famous metal sculpture "Bird in Flight" and was assessed a 40% tariff by Customs, categorizing it as "Machined metal implements, Kitchen Utensils, and Hospital Supplies" rather than the 0% tariff applied to art objects. Brancusi sued the Treasury Department to recover the tariff.
Eventually the Supreme Court agreed with Brancusi that the object was art rather than a mere machined metal object. The core definition of an art object is: something made with the express purpose of being an art object, made by someone recognized as an artist by other artists.
Well, that is a fairly circular definition, in part, but it does clearly lay out the rules. Artists (those people society generally recognizes as artists) get to define art. The corollary: programmers do not get to define their work as art.
The Art of Computer Programming, Vols 1-3
Writes Fortran in a myriad of languages.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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?
here: http://chriscoyne.com/cfdg/
I just found out about this today from Boingboing.
Code snippets, recursive loops, and simple drawing commands turn a script into a remarkably beautiful rendering. I have been messing with it for hours and have only just gotten started. There is MUCH you can do with this.
> 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 didn't know Jackson Pollack was an "artist" .... I just thought he was a shitty painter.
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?
Another example is performance art. None of it has practical value, it's not craft, nor is most of it aesthetically pleasing to the eyes.
I won't speak of all performance arts, just Dance, but it can have a practical value. For both the dancer and for the audience. Years ago I was an amateur dancer, having taken some dance classes in college, danced in different dances, and worked on other dance performances. Several years ago I had a bad accident and the first thing I thought of for physical therapy was dance, so I talked with a friend who taught dance including the ones I took and she recommended I take ballet saying it would help with my coordination and endurance. As it was I didn't have the endurance to take the class. The last tyme I went to class, as usual, I stayed there after ballet and watched the Jazz class and I realized that while I could recall the steps for Jazz, I couldn't recall them for ballet, there would of been no way I would of had the energy for jazz. As for watching, like myself I've known others who feel so much better and/or motivated after watching a dance performance.
And no I wasn't an art or dance major, my major was computer engineering.
FalconShould there be a Law?
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 believe it is art for the very simple reason that there are multiple ways to get the same result. It would be a science if there was one single definate way to do something.
Never could figure out why my girl liked my bitch tits, then I found out she was a lesbian.
programming is like construction work. some programming is simple - just laying one brick atop another. other programming is harder - skyscraping projects. still other programming requires elegance - like a fine architectural piece.
i'm a warehouse-builder, now. i consider it quite on a par with construction work.
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
Art to me reveals itself when it, by its existence, evokes an insight into something greater then the obvious and mundane. I feel transformed after wandering through an art gallery, finishing a well written book that touched me or listening to music that "struck a chord". It is not just the finished product, but the human effort to achieve that product that moves me. The continuous practice of the musician, the inspiration and perspiration of the composer and writer. The baffling achievement of the artist. Glancing at my bookshelf, I see the "Linux Programming Bible by John Goerzen" with its rational layout and copious sample code. I can use it as a reference for "how to do X", but it does not move me. OTOH, TAOCP by Knuth does move me. Even comparing the complexity of the typesetting and the painstaking efforts of the TAOCP author to create the typesetting language in the first place! As for programming as art, one has to decide whether a utilitarian outcome can invoke a trascendental experience. I think good building architecture hints at this, however it is not often that the architect is the one who implements the design. Maybe programming can only be art when the design and the implementation are conceived and delivered by the same person. This precludes the large "sausage factory code" and includes a lot of single author creations such as Perl, Python, TeX, Emacs (regardless of subsequent contributions by others).
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
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.
As a musician, I deal with lots of music from hundreds of years ago, and the best music often takes many years to reach its proper place in public opinion. The art of programming is relatively young, and only pioneering conceptual giants like Babbage (Lovelace?) and Turing spring to my mind as 'great' programmers (though I have never studied computer science).
For example, it's not obvious from a quick search whether any one person was instrumental in conceiving the multi-threaded Apollo Guidance Computer. Unfortunately this is probably the most glamourous computer built in the 1960s, and I fear the rapid pace of tecnological change will keep the art of programming focussed only on the present, relegating both inspired and dull programming to obscurity before proper judgements can be made.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
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?
Programming of any sort of value is most certainly an artform
Well, at least, that is what i think of it as. Anyone can write code. Writing code well and being innovative is an art.
this is also an art
http://gprime.net/images/sidewalkchalkguy/
Coolest thing i have ever seen.
...Now if only he could somehow hook it up to google maps..
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!
And in my own opinion on the matter, I consider my source code to be art. I'm speaking simply about the way that the text on the screen appears -- symmetrical and balanced, with margins and lines flowing in and out to represent the structure of my thoughts, with beautiful blocks of comments dancing atop each block, all the similar operators on adjacent lines column aligned... I derive pure joy from just viewing a properly structured source file.
Perhaps it's not art -- rather just aesthetics -- but for me it's an expression of my love for the work that I do -- much like Linus said in his quote. It also makes reviewing old code much easier and more enjoyable than when it's a garbled mess of left-aligned or non-commented rubbish. The true joy? When a talented group of developers all discover a love for that same aesthetic, and over the years each of their code in all its perfect beauty becomes indistinguishable amoung them.
... because he doesn't ever try to "break his code". Note that all the quoted commentary is in support of the thesis with no serious look at opposing points of view.
In order for software to be correct it must run. Running involves being mathematically correct for the target platform. i.e., sequence, size, and timing are all correct.
Artists don't rework their art based on critique, i.e., peer review.
Is CS art equal to code bloat? A wheel is a wheel; strengthening the wheel usually isn't considered art, but decorating the wheel is considered art. Non-functional decoration of software is code bloat.