imo, programming can make u 10x richer, more ambitious and it also improves ur intelligence
Programming is Art
21–30 of 208 posts
Re: Programming is Art
#22Lovely to read, but AI will surely remove a lot of software engineering with little creativity.
Programming for money means managing a codebase and that's more akin to biology. You add inhibitors, promoters, etc. depending on the current requirements of the environment.
When excel is good enough to do that, people will use excel and not pay you to manage a monolith or even allow R/D to start from a blank slate with a new take.
What you create on a blank slate with your ideas might be art, but it's usually not evolving, you keep the picture, album etc. frozen in that state.
Re: Programming is Art
#23> I love building startups, and they love writing code. For me, building projects is a way to make money. For them, programming is art. At its very high points programming approaches art, but programming is primarily problem solving, which isn't fundamentally artistic because its main goal is correctness and fitness for purpose, not aesthetic value. I'm pretty sure for most of us the choice to use LLMs or not has not…
I don't know. I have a fascination with code structure which is definitely primarily aesthetic, not practical --- which is a compulsion I have to suppress when doing code professionally for practical reasons. (Sometimes you have to deliver.)
I find it incredible when the concepts in a system fall into place and start lining up and you get these unexpected relationships that "just work". It's beautiful in the same way mathematics is beautiful. It's lovely when something is made of lots of pieces at first and then suddenly collapse and simplify into a single structure.
I also enjoy other bits of programming. I like the flow state, I like the act of creation, I like feeling like I have an impact, I like being paid. So it's not like people fall into one category or another, and it's not like programming is one single thing. There's room within any discipline for creativity and for art.
I think many professional artists probably spend much of their time problem-solving, too --- authors trying to fit plot points together, sculptors working out which materials will work with which ones.
Re: Programming is Art
#24Why are people mixing everything up? Since when code has a soul? AI can be just a tool. You use it the same way you use a keyboard, a computer, a pencil, etc. I'm pretty sure you can build art with it, much like using any tool. People are making art with ascii. You can do art with anything. But AI can also be much more than a tool, and why can't it have a soul? What's a soul anyway, except something that humans are m…
> AI can be just a tool. [...] But AI can also be much more than a tool, [...]. Contradictio . Going back to Seven... > AI can be just a tool. Nothing, ever, is just a tool.
Where’s the contradiction?? X can be just Y, and X can be much more than Y. No contradiction, just an observation that you can use it one way or another.
Re: Programming is Art
#25Lovely to read, but AI will surely remove a lot of software engineering with little creativity. Programming for money means managing a codebase and that's more akin to biology. You add inhibitors, promoters, etc. depending on the current requirements of the environment. When excel is good enough to do that, people will use excel and not pay you to manage a monolith or even allow R/D to start from a blank slate with a…
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Re: Programming is Art
#26System design and architecture are the art. Programming is a set of techniques useful in realizing these compositions.
I've never once in my life looked at a piece of code and thought "I am in the presence of god". However, the systems composed by code can often elicit this response.
Re: Programming is Art
#27I never liked the idea that programming is an art. When there's a problem that you're trying to solve there's usually only one or two good ways to solve it and hopefully you know one of those approaches. When you start getting creative is when you start running into long-term problems, especially maintenance. It's like chess. When you're an amateur you think your moves out, strategize, think that you're a genius for…
Boring and standard more often than not results in me having to trace through six files.
Re: Programming is Art
#28I never liked the idea that programming is an art. When there's a problem that you're trying to solve there's usually only one or two good ways to solve it and hopefully you know one of those approaches. When you start getting creative is when you start running into long-term problems, especially maintenance. It's like chess. When you're an amateur you think your moves out, strategize, think that you're a genius for…
I believe there are many top level chess masters that consider chess an art. Same for programmers, to many of the best, it is an art form or at least a craft that they take very seriously. And many would disagree that programming is solved. "Boring and standard" can be a sign of quality, but it also applies to those code bases that don't solve any interesting problems and just drown in boilerplate, kept alive by dozens or hundreds of programmer drones just working to collect their paychecks.
Re: Programming is Art
#29imo, programming can make u 10x richer, more ambitious and it also improves ur intelligence
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Re: Programming is Art
#30Why are people mixing everything up? Since when code has a soul? AI can be just a tool. You use it the same way you use a keyboard, a computer, a pencil, etc. I'm pretty sure you can build art with it, much like using any tool. People are making art with ascii. You can do art with anything. But AI can also be much more than a tool, and why can't it have a soul? What's a soul anyway, except something that humans are m…
> Since when code has a soul?
Since always, it is often just not recognized. Perhaps the same way how a newspaper article has soul and a fingerprint of the author, though you may not recognize it while reading.
> You can do art with anything.
Sure and anything you do can be art.