Programming is Art

> 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 making up to convince themselves that they are more than flesh and bones?

I’m finding this fascinating personally. The lines people are drawing to try and keep themselves inside some definition they can mark as special.

Labels rarely fit well. We can't even agree on the definition of "art".

I would prefer to say "fascination", because for some people, writing code is their fascination. Is it art if only they would label it so? Because I'm pretty sure that if a "code artist" showed their code to 10 other experienced developers, not only would some of the others not consider it art, but likely some of the others would consider it low quality.

Are code golfers artists? Fetishists? What if they believe theirs is the only way - the true artistry of coding? Would all of our single-responsibility, immutable core/imperative shell hybrid-functional code be discounted as garbage? (Not poking at the code golfers; I think they do it for the challenge, not because they believe that is how code should be written; but it illustrates an extreme.)

For most people, I think it's fair to say they write code because they are trying to make something happen. If their code runs without errors, in the necessary time, and without exhausting the computer's memory, then I believe most would consider that code "good": it does the job.

Are they working with others? Will others need to read it? If so, perhaps the most artistic code is not the best code to write. I know many professionals dislike working with the code artist who makes code that is unreadable to all but the most skilled developers, because it causes friction and leads to misunderstandings and bugs.

Now we have reached the point where general purpose code is so easily and correctly built by our AI tools that there is no practical point to writing it ourselves.

Are the AI-naysayers, the purists, writing their own libraries? Are they building everything from scratch? If not, they are not the true code artists. They have made practical concessions. They just haven't graduated to the realization that code is a commodity.

I suspect the people most against use of AI for building are the people who lack the creativity - the idea sources - and live just to translate requirements into code. They will gradually find fewer opportunities, and this threat is what probably makes them get emotional when looking at AI-built products.

Nothing ever is just a tool. Saying that X "can just be a tool" is a fundamental violation of that statement; saying then "X can be much more than just a tool" is a violation in form of a contradiction. It's very easy to parse...

Playing go is art. Go was even considered one of the four main arts in ancient China. Along with calligraphy, instrumental music and brush painting[0].

It didn't stop AlphaGo from beating the best human go players, though.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_arts

> I like it when new ideas for the text come to me as I’m writing. The writing process itself — the thinking that goes on in the moment — is important to me, not just the result.

This. Applies to me while writing text, writing code and writing data analyses.