Knuth: Computer Programming as an Art (1974)

I've always felt writing working software was like creating art. I am pleased when something works and does something interesting after a long effort.

> Yeah you "explore stuff" in any field.

And you do experiments in many fields!

"An experiment is a procedure carried out to verify, refute, or establish the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a particular factor is manipulated. Experiments vary greatly in goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiment

Particularly debugging, if you aren't completely random, usually takes on the form of repeated experiments.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DebuggingAndTheScientificMethod

I have done a lot of performance work in my career, and there you run experiments almost continuously. At least you do if you actually want to have an effect. Admittedly, many people try to optimize without running experiments. That tends to not be very effective.

And yes, computer systems are easily sufficiently complex that reasoning it out ahead of time without running the experiment tends to be completely futile except for the most trivial arrangements. In fact, even in some situations that seem completely trivial.

> I am going to buy milk -- it's an experiment to see what happens.

If you have a hypothesis and you're trying to find out if it is true or not, sure, that can be an experiment. Usually it probably won't be.

> I am drinking coffee in the morning, it's an experiment to see if it will still keep me awake.

That certainly can be an experiment, for example if you vary the amount of coffee to see how much of will be keep you awake. Though it seems unlikely that you will be isolating the variables sufficiently. With computers, isolating the variables is often a lot simpler.

> By that token we've diluted the word science to not really mean anything anymore.

Going with your straw-men: probably.

> And you do experiments in many fields!

See you are proving my own point. Just because you do exploratory stuff and run "experiments" that doesn't make what you science. What isn't science then?

> I have done a lot of performance work in my career, and there you run experiments almost continuously

Yes me too. But I am not a scientist like Einstein.

There is a stretch in going from I am debugging some program and trying various things to saying I am a scientist.

You can sure call yourself a scientist but you have to explore why you want to do that. Is to make yourself feel better because the word "programmer" is boring or implies a lower status. What about craftsman, you are" crafting software" is that imply something undesirable, if so why? What about business problem solver?

Licensed engineers even scoff at software "engineers" even calling themselves "engineers" (even though what most computer scientist do is kind of like engineering), because they don't have a license etc.

Paul Cronin: Are you an artist?

Herzog: Never. All I've ever wanted to be is a foot soldier of cinema.

The reason I find Haskell interesting is precisely that it's the only place I know where the theoretically-minded and the practically-minded get together and interpollinate. Everywhere else the one group pretty much just sneers at the other. If it doesn't always go 100% smoothly in Haskell-land, well, it's not as if we collectively have a lot of practice in getting along across that boundary.

Consequently, Haskell is one of the few places where any interesting progress is being made in the field of programming. The pure theoreticals continue spinning off into ever-more-rarified lands of type theory that are already all but impossible to use in practice, and the practicals are stuck shuffling around the same things over and over again in the same basic languages they've had since the late 1990s, just with a few more fancier curlicues added. (Every once in a while they'll import an idea from the academic side, but not without pretending they came up with it on their own while still sneering at the very thought that maybe if one thing was useful from over there, other things might be useful too....)

(Rust may someday also be an exception, though I'm currently unsure whether Rust's community will make progress in the general field of programming, or whether they'll make Rust-specific progress. A certain amount of Rust-specific progress is required either way before we can tell.)