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Programming is Art

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Re: Programming is Art

#201

Post by gps372 »

dust-jacket wrote: post #171
gps372 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think art's definition would be even broader. Anything that involves your imagination, skill, ideas and analysis (applying yourself to the choices in front of you) would be art. Just googled and verified this, btw. If choosing what to have for lunch is making you involve your imagination and analyse choices, then I guess it would fall in the category of art. And due to restraints of time, budget and prior experienc…

/shrugs OK. Well I am clearly an art master of lunch planning. Who knew?

>> Who knew?

You must have 'mastered' this art. Unless you are willing to share this mastery and ask for feedback, only you would know!

Re: Programming is Art

#202

Post by Stitch4223 »

luxcem wrote: post #109
trashb wrote: post #46

I 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.

There are certainly pieces of code that should be put on display, for example productions from the demoscene[1] and competitions like the underhanded C contest [2].

The code in these cases is usually wizardry understood by a select few, but the stories, optimizations, trickery and even formatting can be told to anyone who loves design.

[1] https://demozoo.org/ [2] https://www.ioccc.org/

Re: Programming is Art

#203

Post by teaearlgraycold »

Martin_Silenus wrote: post #192
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 man…

It didn't click, did it? You're a kind person, you know, but I'm not. I'm a misanthropic megalomaniac guy. > 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 The things I'm the proudest of are, by far, the most useless and unhelpful ones. The ones I did for myself. The ones that made me think "wow, now I rock!"…

Well I definitely don’t like coding as much as you do. And don’t give up your hobbies to appease anyone, least of all me.

Re: Programming is Art

#204

Post by dust-jacket »

gps372 wrote: post #201
dust-jacket wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/shrugs OK. Well I am clearly an art master of lunch planning. Who knew?

>> Who knew? You must have 'mastered' this art. Unless you are willing to share this mastery and ask for feedback, only you would know!

Well I do make a pretty good sandwich :)

Re: Programming is Art

#205

Post by qarl »

I feel the opposite.

As an old man now, I can think back over my lifetime of programming, and I remember all the ideas I've had but had no time or energy to execute.

I've landed 5 super fun ideas in the last 5 months.

It feels like flying. This is truly an amazing time to be alive.

Re: Programming is Art

#206

Post by satiated_grue »

luxcem wrote: post #109
trashb wrote: post #46

I 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.

They'll pay for it for their private collections, though.

https://www.artsy.net/feature/the-algorithm-auction

Re: Programming is Art

#207

Post by red75prime »

red75prime wrote: post #103
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's supposed to be experienced, not 'operationalized.'

You need to operationalize it to decide whether non-human systems can have it.

At least, to discuss it, rather than having other people wisely nodding along: "I feel that too."

Re: Programming is Art

#208

Post by johnnyanmac »

Martin_Silenus wrote: post #92

Well, 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.

When there's a day I can get properly architected, performant code out of agents, I will happily let it take over the reins. Because coding is not the hardest part of the process in my domain and I wouldn't mind more time to focus on other aspects if I can trust others to code.

But as is: it just output stuff that will not scale properly, and wrangling it takes just as much time as me coding it up myself. So it's in my hands until then. I've found LLM's somewhat useful as a first-order discovery in documentation, and not much farther. Try to trust it as an oracle replacement of all search/documentation and you'll be burned once every few days.

Re: Programming is Art

#209

Post by johnnyanmac »

theptip wrote: post #163

It’s really important to understand the various perspectives in AI discourse; those who view Programing as Art feel a deep affront and threat on many levels. It’s legitimate. If you loved the art of writing code, and also enjoyed getting paid a boatload for that activity, you’re losing out in the trade as AI shifts the focus of software from coding to designing. I do think that we could see a golden age in Programmin…

>If you loved the art of writing code, and also enjoyed getting paid a boatload for that activity

I enjoyed being able to pay rent. A drop from my peak of 160k to 80k would have sucked but would make due as a single male. Going from 160k to 0 dollars and suddenly the job market stiffens up for 3 years is what radicalizes me.

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