This is an argument frequently put forth by people who have no idea what art is.

Programming is only "art" because those that aren't good at it don't know how those who are good at it do what they do.

Yeah, I don't know what art is.

Sorry for my delay, I've been working on a song ...

Richard Stallman, the guy that wrote the GNU utilities for Linux and made GNU/Linux into a full fledged Operating System, apparently thinks programming is a type of art; a craft specifically.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2...artofprog.html


Edit: I wasn't aware of this person, or this work, but apparently a guy by the name of Donald Knuth not only thinks programming is an art form, but he's written a 4 volume set of books on the subject. And about this guy ...

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Prog...er+programming


But nah, let's just tell an artist who would tend to agree that programming is art that they have no idea what art is.

You aren't Richard Stallman or Donald Knuth, these are top names in the field, responsible for creating more computer science than you know. You can romanticize creating crystal palaces all you want and if you're lucky you'll get to work on something that is fantastic. Mostly you'll be writing services to CRUD user data, or hit some other service and display the results or debugging someone else's code. Oh sure, you'll get to do it in shorts and a T-shirt with a screen shot of some meme that shows off your originality on the back of your monitor, but you'll not be making art.

I'm a programmer and programming is not art. It maybe can be if you try really hard but the default acts of a programmer in the course of writing code to solve a problem are absolutely 100% not art.

This is 100% like, your opinion, man, and other programmers have different opinions. As evidenced by my previous post. Also worth mentioning is that you contradict yourself.

Yeah, I'm not a programmer and completely disagree. My job is coming up with math that is eventually turned into code by other people. The worst part of my job is seeing some crappy subroutine that I wrote in the algorithm design phase thats copied from python into C and used a thousand times in live code. Like I only wrote it like that because I didn't have time to write it properly. There is only a handful of coders I'll give subroutines anymore and they are the people who will bother to learn what the program is meant to do and not just copy it over as a black box. And alot of these guys have Phds in CS from MIT, Harvard etc. Its definitely an art.

Sounds like a cool job!

Nah, it kinda sucks tbh. I mean, if it was a 40 hour a week gig it would be the best job ever but it is closer to 80 than 40. Really thinking about taking an interview at Google for way less pay and prob a worse job than I turned down after grad school.

Nothing you've written here qualifies programming as art (I'm a programmer myself).

Yeah...I think programmers maybe are the least likely to understand the artistry,

Saying there is "an art" to doing something because you can do a shitty job versus a good job at it does not mean it is art, not even close, wtf?

Like most things, there are varying degrees of science, craftmanship, creativity, artistry, analytics, and engineering.

Then of course there is all of the considerations that come with what it means to be artistic.

To simply proclaim that programming is "not art" seems pretty incorrect from my view.

Programming is art the way that making a burger is art. Sometimes chefs can do something crazy and new that you might consider art but most of the time they're just making a ****ing burger.

I would say burgers that **** are quite crazy and new!

That is a bit funny / coincidental because I was going to make a similar food as art comparison but taken in a different direction.

I think Darryl at Jimmy John's and Jose Andres may have different interpretations to the question 'Is preparing food art?'.

Anthony Bourdain Kitchen Confidential:

"Cooking is a craft. There's nothing wrong with that: the great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsman -- though not designed by them. Practicing your craft in an expert fashion is noble, honorable, and satisfying. And I'll generally take the stand-up mercenary who takes pride in his professionalism over an artist any day. Artists: more often then not their efforts, convinced as they are of their own genius, are geared more to giving themselves a hard-on than satisfying the great majority of dinner customers. Personally I'd prefer to eat food that tastes good and is an honest reflection of its ingredients than a 3-foot-tall caprice constructed from lemon grass, lawn trimmings, coconuts and red curry."

Seems pretty true imo even in the pharmacy world. Very smart people who enjoy constructing unnecessarily fancy and elaborate plans of care are generally much less valuable than people that do an honest, straightforward job.

It's a pointless argument because nobody can define art. That said, the problem with the idea of programming as a craft and therefore an art is that there is nobody out there - as far as I know - getting paid to write code simply because people find that code aesthetically pleasing. Like, we're all on board with architecture being art under some circumstances, but that doesn't mean that a guy who engineers building foundations is an artist, even though I'm sure if you're into it there are foundations that are more and less elegant and aesthetically pleasing.

But like I said, the problem is that art is a fuzzy concept that cannot be defined. If someone asked me if I was in good health, I would say "yes" despite the fact that I have an unrepaired complete ACL tear in my left leg and have had lower back pain for the past couple days. "Good health" is not a binary thing where one either possesses it or one doesn't, rather it's a concept that describes people to a greater or lesser extent, where one ticks some boxes and not others. Similarly, things exist on a sliding scale where they are either not at all artistic through to obviously and completely artistic, ticking off various sub-points like "is this something other people get aesthetic enjoyment from, is this something people invest a personal style into" etc. I think if I were forced to choose "art" or "not art" for programming it would be the latter, but the actual answer is that it ticks some boxes and not others.

I think this is a pretty good post, and I tend to agree that art cannot be defined.

Your conclusion doesn't seem to logically follow your premise however. You began by stating that art cannot be defined, but yet you seem to try to define it in a way that pleasing aesthetics is a necessary component.

There are some very aesthetically unpleasing things in this world that are art. For instance, I think a lot of music found on the radio these days is not aesthetically pleasing. But what is aesthetically pleasing, or not pleasing, comes down to personal interpretation, and subjectivity, and I think ultimately what is or isn't art also comes down to personal interpretation and subjectivity.

Another issue with your post, which I still think is pretty good, is that code produces an output, much like food ingredients/cooking. So perhaps the code itself isn't aesthetically pleasing, but the final product could be. For instance, you could write a program that would draw geometric patterns on your screen, and the code itself might be hideous to look at, but the output might be beautiful.

But again, beauty is not necessary for something to be art imo. I actually think it would be pretty artistic to write a program like the one I described above that defies all the best practices of programming, but produces beautiful geometric shapes. Like the output would obviously be considered art, but the fact that hideous code produced it could be art too, imo.

Yeah, rather than aesthetically pleasing I should have said art is something that imo is produced for the effect of "moving" another human being. Like, death metal is not aesthetically pleasing, but it has the purpose of producing some sort of "emotional" (very broadly defined) reaction in another person.

I think everyone would agree that's a pretty big checkmark in whether something is art or not. Sure, you could probably produce counterexamples, and not everyone would agree on how important this criterion is, it's more like my opinion that I hope proves persuasive to other people. It's kind of like "X is not in good health, they are an alcoholic" and someone can be like "well sure, they drink too much, but they're fine so far, no liver issues" and we've uncovered a disagreement on what "good health" is. So while "X is an alcoholic" will not lead to 100% of people concluding that X is not in good health, it's still a useful argument.

As far as code producing something artistic goes, I would disagree that that can make the code itself art. Cameras are not art just because they are the tool used to produce art, paint and canvas are not art just because they are a medium in which art happens. In the case of horrible code producing a beautiful result, that could be art, but the art there is the abstract idea rather than the code. Hair splitting I know, it's just what I think.

"After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well." - Albert Einstein

You sure Poincare didn't say that?

I don't think so, as I have only ever seen it attributed to Einstein (along with a slight variation on the same note).

Unless you are making a Poincare joke I am overlooking?

Anyhow, enjoy a video on Poincare from one of my top 20 favorite people, Persi Diaconis:

Relativity priority dispute joke.