I don't see the point in trying to persuade other people which fields constitute art. You're free to appreciate things without needing them certified.
Why is programming an art
11–20 of 45 posts
Re: Why is programming an art
#12I wrote on these very same points recently, but argued differently - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804423
Re: Why is programming an art
#13By these vague definitions is there any professional endeavor that isn't an art? And if not haven't we just removed all unique meaning from the word 'art'?
It's better described as a craft than an art. Crafts produce something functional and require being pieced together with special knowledge. There is crossover between craft and art, but programmers are closer to the members of guilds, not galleries.
Re: Why is programming an art
#14Programming is an art, but as you get older and more experienced, you become less able to express yourself in a way that doesn't seem both rote and belabored.
It is closer to making furniture than painting or sculpture, as it tends to need to be practical in some way. But if it were furniture making, you'd continually be presented with new designs, new types of wood and other materials, and new tools to make your furniture with, so you'd never know exactly how long it would take to make a couch or a bedroom set.
Re: Why is programming an art
#15By these vague definitions is there any professional endeavor that isn't an art? And if not haven't we just removed all unique meaning from the word 'art'?
Donald Knuth makes a much more compelling argument. [1]
[1] - http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1290000/1283929/a1974-knuth....
Re: Why is programming an art
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
English, and many other gendered languages, have a long history of using the masculine in place of an unknown. Using "he or she" instead is, in my opinion, both annoying to write and read.
I think they is nice alternative
This is something that I always saw as 'English syntactic sugar' as a non-native speaker.
When I realized that a plural form of the third person could be used in a gender-neutral way for the singular form, I was in awe.
* * *
Trivia:
In French, the common rule is "le masculin l'emporte"[1], which means the "male form wins"; if you talk about a group of 100 females and a single male, you must use the male form "ils" instead of the female form "elles".
[1]: [...] on abrège parfois cette règle en "le masculin l'emporte sur le féminin", alors qu'il serait correct de dire : seul les groupes exclusivement féminin sont féminins, les autres utilisent le genre non marqué.
Roughly translated to : It is more correct to say that groups exclusively composed of females are accorded using the female form, while the other groups use the 'unmarked' form (which is the male form).
Re: Why is programming an art
#17I believe programming is an art because "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." (Abelson, SICP) This heart of the matter, and it means programming is an art, a social one. Like marketing or graphic design, it's an art for other people. Programs must be written to be as readable as possible, to as many people as possible, while still being functional and elegant. T…
> This heart of the matter, and it means programming is an art, a social one.
No, it doesn't. It just means that programming is inherently about communication (among other things). That does not, by a long shot, make it art.
Re: Why is programming an art
#18Programming is an art, but as you get older and more experienced, you become less able to express yourself in a way that doesn't seem both rote and belabored. It is closer to making furniture than painting or sculpture, as it tends to need to be practical in some way. But if it were furniture making, you'd continually be presented with new designs, new types of wood and other materials, and new tools to make your fur…
i.e. it's not an art - it's a craft.
Re: Why is programming an art
#19While the difficulty of and controversities over defining what "art" means are proverbial:
No, in full generality it's not - that's pretentious bullshit fancied by amateurs who want to cram as much meaning as possible into what they do.
Like painting, pottery, or photography, programming can be used to do art, but most of the time (99.9%+) it's just a mix of craft and industrial design, done to achieve a practical goal.
Re: Why is programming an art
#20(On John Carmack) "It was written that his code is so ugly according to the best practices standards, that only he completely understands what he has written. And we all know that he is a genius." No, his code isn't ugly. No, not only he understands it. It is actually considered exceptionally beautiful ( http://kotaku.com/5975610/the-exceptional-beauty-of-doom-3s-... ). Beyond that, even if it was (which it isn't), y…
Thanks for the links. I didn't say that John's code is ugly, I just remember reading about it in some magazine. They (magazine) obviously didn't have a clue back then ...