Earlier quoted context omitted.
A banana and duct tape can be just a snack and a tool for fixing a leak.
Or .. art. https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/art/featu...
Yes that was the point of the comment.
Programming is Art
111–120 of 207 posts
Re: Programming is Art
#112Art is "expression of an idea". Programming ISN'T art; the program/game/website could be, but programming is a CRAFT. The people he mentions are not artists, they are craftsmen.
I feel like your definition of Art is too simplistic and incomplete. At least since Joseph Beuys we know that "anything can be Art", and it's just a matter of how an "expression of an idea" is used to lift something up to the status of being Art. Crafts, as practices, are not excluded from that potential.
While some artists turn the labor-intensive aspects of crafting into a part of their expression (including any angles on tradition and social-economic factors), like Ai Weiweis[0] installation Sunflower Seeds[1] in the Tate Modern in London, others might focus on the community aspect of crafting as part of their media, like how Thomas Hirschhorns[2] installation Musée précaire Albinet[3][4][5] close to Paris takes crafting as a means to "be present and produce something together on location", as "agreement", as part of a community in a public space, and as inclusion of anybody beyond differences in the understanding of Art. AFAICR he could even get the Mona Lisa from the Louvre for a few days to exhibit it there.
Besides, I think it's safe to say that any work in the field of Performing Arts is based on an analysis of their craft.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_Weiwei
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower_Seeds_(artwork)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hirschhorn
[3]: https://www.thomashirschhorn.com/musee-precaire-albinet/
[4]: https://www.thomashirschhorn.com/about-the-musee-precaire-al...
[5]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus%C3%A9e_pr%C3%A9caire_Albin...
Re: Programming is Art
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this was true 1+ years ago, the agents don't write bad code anymore. They might not write according to your preferences, but you can also have it adjust to your style. Also, humans didn't evolve to write or read code, even the best programmers are terrible at it from an objective point of view, if we compare it to what is theoretically possible.
The agents still write bad code unless my colleagues and the people who submit PRs to the repos I am responsible for somehow use agents from last year. And, no, it is not a question about style or preferences, the code is messy and contains to me as a maintainer obvious bugs.
>still write bad code unless my colleagues and the people who submit PRs
It's interesting you feel comfortable to comment with such authority on the capability of a tool you don't even use... Lisp is a bad programming language because my 10 year old brother wrote some really bad stuff, btw!
Re: Programming is Art
#114Well, my way of thinking about it is basically that I did not spend my life shiting on over-engineered-bloated-Golberg-machine source code written by so-called programmers to finish my life asking agents to generate these same stuff 10x faster. I love code, you don't, fine. So be it.
Why do you assume any point in time criticism of AI code generation is reliable to project even a couple of months into the future?
Because all the important ones have been true since 2022 and will be true forever, because they have nothing to do with LLM capabilities and instead are focused on LLM nature.
Re: Programming is Art
#115Well, my way of thinking about it is basically that I did not spend my life shiting on over-engineered-bloated-Golberg-machine source code written by so-called programmers to finish my life asking agents to generate these same stuff 10x faster. I love code, you don't, fine. So be it.
While this was true 1+ years ago, the agents don't write bad code anymore. They might not write according to your preferences, but you can also have it adjust to your style. Also, humans didn't evolve to write or read code, even the best programmers are terrible at it from an objective point of view, if we compare it to what is theoretically possible.
So why doesn't Anthropic write a good Claude Code in Rust already? Why don't we get a Codex with the polish level of Sublime text editor?
These companies have many billion dollar investments and yet their main product is a bloated meh.
Re: Programming is Art
#116I 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…
Excellent analogy which I'm annoyed I didn't think of myself.
Re: Programming is Art
#117Programming is more engineering than art.
People tend to naturally develop feelings toward whatever they work with for a prolonged period of time and that applies to programming languages too. Mainstream languages for software development generally prioritize correctness, reliability, performance and other engineering concerns primarily, and then try to make the language ergonomic to the possible degree. In the meanwhile, those engineering judgements acquire aesthetic feelings.
When someone says that a particular language's code snippet is beautiful, they almost always mean that the engineering effort that went into the language's design that made that particular captivating expression or statement possible is credit worthy. Its more like a way to appreciating the engineering effort and not treating it literally as "art".
I would have agreed with the "art" part to a certain degree if at least a few mainstream programming languages are substantially more denotational in their semantics but unfortunately, almost all of them adhere to operational semantics mostly and that is basically "my" issue with treating programming as "art". Even when it is art, it can't be for software development(with imperative languages) in particular. So, to proof assistants, purely functional languages, Lisp dialects, there might be some "art" involved. And this is why the concept of "art" for programming is fundamentally fucked up. NVM.
Re: Programming is Art
#118I 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…
Nobody will go to an exhibition or a museum to stare at code like we do with paintings. The public for creative programming is really thin.
Maybe not, but the process of creation and the final result will be of interest to other creators. Like any hobby it might seem strange to outsiders but it will be fascinating to those who are part of the scene.
Re: Programming is Art
#119Well, my way of thinking about it is basically that I did not spend my life shiting on over-engineered-bloated-Golberg-machine source code written by so-called programmers to finish my life asking agents to generate these same stuff 10x faster. I love code, you don't, fine. So be it.
I have some lines of code I’ve written that I quite cherish. I’ve posted about such excerpts many times online. So we both like code quite a bit.
I think you’re letting your pride get the best of you. Writing software should not be about ego. It’s about making something helpful, or something beautiful, or at the very least financially useful. Interacting with software through a natural language interface does not mandate you are creating junk. I won’t tell you how to use the tool. But I am sure if you were sufficiently motivated you’d learn how to make it work for you.
Re: Programming is Art
#120Weaving is art.
Should we replace "programming" and "programmers" with "weaving" and "weavers" in this write-up and refer to history and how it worked out for weavers during the industrial revolution, I think it is clear where all this is going.
I know some people are mad about this and I am as well. However, as someone that is 20+ years in the field, I feel I've seen enough to say things are fundamentally and irreversibly changing.