AI as technology is cool and all, as cool as GCC or Linux or HTTP. The thing I don’t like about AI is that 99% of the time we talk about vendor-locked AI (claude, codex) and 99% of the time we use those. So you need to pay to use the models. You depend on the big corporations. It’s not anymore, I clone this repo and let’s explore freely.
Programming is Art
51–60 of 208 posts
Re: Programming is Art
#52Art is a system. And programming is a system too. They are different systems. > If I learned PHP, I could build back-end applications. If I learned HTML and CSS, I could build websites. So, what have you been doing for the last 10 years and why i see only 2026 in your github?
> Art is a system. And programming is a system too. They are different systems.
From a system-centric POV the art world could be considered a system, and the programming world could be considered a system.
Programming is a craft and can therefor be part of an artistic practice as well as many other practices.
What's Art and what isn't is up to each individual and remains generally undefined.
> So, what have you been doing for the last 10 years and why i see only 2026 in your github?
Self-hosted git services are a thing, ya know?
Re: Programming is Art
#53I'd say this article is a stronger argument that "programming can be a hobby" than "programming is an art". Lots of people do lots of things for enjoyment without a salary, and we tend not to call all of those things an artform.
There's lots of competing definitions of art, but I don't think the article has reasonably linked programming to any of them. Maybe there's a thin & stretched link to the concept of a starving artist.
Re: Programming is Art
#54I am (still) not a proponent for AI, however I hope AI might do to programming what the camera did to painting, and I hope that will be a good thing. What we understand as painting today is very different then what painting meant pre-camera. Now it is mostly a leisure activity and creative outlet. Where back in the day it was a serious occupation for capturing reality, and therefore creativity was taking second stage…
Yes, Silicon Valley became Wall Street and that basically ruined it completely. Soon as the term brogrammer was coined it was over.
Re: Programming is Art
#55Playing 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
It won't stop people from enjoying playing Go, though
There is one thing that upsets many people though...
if err != nil { return nil, err }
Re: Programming is Art
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't know what a soul is, and you think it's something people just make up, then you are missing out on the experience of being human and you have a bigger problem than not being able to understand what art is.
Is it this fuzzy blob of ineffable experiences, aesthetics, qualia, self-reference, dualism, spirituality and other things? I don't need to reject all this to notice that its fuzziness makes it impossible to operationalize.
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Re: Programming is Art
#57It's still too early to say what will the outlook be like in the next ten years, wrt to AI, but one thing I am perfectly sure of is: AI will always produce 'errors' due to the fundamental fact that it's heuristics-based.
Maybe fewer and fewer, but the mistakes will never be totally eliminated. This is why those wanting to learn how to write software shouldn't get discouraged that 'Oh, AI will replace human programmers'.
Re: Programming is Art
#58Most solutioning is art, given that you should have more than one way to reach the target state and target state itself is negotiable and non-concrete. When there are multiple options you are forced to analyze between them, sometimes you have a preferred option if the analysis has been done before. Your choices while solutioning will reflect your experience and how you think. In short, it definitely reflects 'you'.
You make similar kind of choices while programming as well. Hence, programming is definitely an art since there are many ways something can be implemented, almost to the level that you can recognize who has written the code by seeing the code itself. Most such programmers don't even have the visibility to higher level goals of the org they are working in, I used to be in this group earlier.
I remember it used to be a 'problem' for a lot of senior developers, who used to ask for consistency in how code is written, like spacing between keywords, indentation, start/end of parenthesis, naming convention, etc. Wondering if they'll settle for more 'Soul' in the code now :). Or maybe, they have permanently shifted to the other groups now - where only the output matters.
Re: Programming is Art
#59> 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.
Exactly this. You always have to choose what to leave in, what to take out. "Ways to do it" suggest themselves, and you weigh them, "is it the best fit for this project". A lot of what's left out evaporates into the void, but often enough you stumble onto one of these doesn't-fits that's nonetheless a keeper. You know it'll be useful somewhere else, or as the heart of something new.
Sure, you create the product, but it's these other by-the-way ideas that keep one coming back.
Re: Programming is Art
#60It's still too early to say what will the outlook be like in the next ten years, wrt to AI, but one thing I am perfectly sure of is: AI will always produce 'errors' due to the fundamental fact that it's heuristics-based. Maybe fewer and fewer, but the mistakes will never be totally eliminated. This is why those wanting to learn how to write software shouldn't get discouraged that 'Oh, AI will replace human programmer…
I fail to see why this is a good argument against AI replacing humans, given that humans also produce errors.