As a programmer and an artist sculpture/painter I have a problem with this term "fine art". I have artist friends that were in the Fluxes Movement which makes up a part of art history of the 20th century that are not invovled with "fine art".
All of you should read Christopher Alexander's "The Timeless Way of Building" and His new series "The Phenomenon of Life". This whole discussion goes no where just as the discussion among my fellow artist on the question of art versus craft. The point Mr. Alexander makes is that a work of art, craft, building or program has a quality he calls "life". His theory is all things have some degree of life. It's the programs that have this life quality that should be the goal of all programmers.
Chistopher Alexander is one that came up with the idea of pattern Language, but not for programming.
Software development has pretty much been taken over by buisness. I've been laid off for over a year now, but there is a struggle over my enjoyment of developing software versus the crap that has infected the industry. Management has to make the decisions, but few of the ones I've dealt with were capable of understanding the issues. I worked at companies where someone from QA who took a 2 week class in C++ was granted full developer status and an architect who to prove me wrong about performance issues for mutexes wrote a program that created ten thousand mutexes (no threads to access them) and deleted them to prove me wrong, a team lead that didnt understand class instantiation (he wrote an entire service in one class).
Some of the colleges in the area seem to be years behind in classes they offer. Even when I was going to school there were several people in classes where the requirement was C where I would struggle helping them to at least resemble a program. Yet they passed the course.
The problem is compounded by the fact that at 40 years of age a programmer is seen as over the hill (again primarily by the buisness side).
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As a programmer and an artist sculpture/painter I have a problem with this term "fine art". I have artist friends that were in the Fluxes Movement which makes up a part of art history of the 20th century that are not invovled with "fine art". All of you should read Christopher Alexander's "The Timeless Way of Building" and His new series "The Phenomenon of Life". This whole discussion goes no where just as the discussion among my fellow artist on the question of art versus craft. The point Mr. Alexander makes is that a work of art, craft, building or program has a quality he calls "life". His theory is all things have some degree of life. It's the programs that have this life quality that should be the goal of all programmers. Chistopher Alexander is one that came up with the idea of pattern Language, but not for programming.
Software development has pretty much been taken over by buisness. I've been laid off for over a year now, but there is a struggle over my enjoyment of developing software versus the crap that has infected the industry. Management has to make the decisions, but few of the ones I've dealt with were capable of understanding the issues. I worked at companies where someone from QA who took a 2 week class in C++ was granted full developer status and an architect who to prove me wrong about performance issues for mutexes wrote a program that created ten thousand mutexes (no threads to access them) and deleted them to prove me wrong, a team lead that didnt understand class instantiation (he wrote an entire service in one class). Some of the colleges in the area seem to be years behind in classes they offer. Even when I was going to school there were several people in classes where the requirement was C where I would struggle helping them to at least resemble a program. Yet they passed the course. The problem is compounded by the fact that at 40 years of age a programmer is seen as over the hill (again primarily by the buisness side).