31–40 of 45 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they is nice alternative
I usually use they , but now that I think about it, I'm going to start using s/he . It's the same number of characters as they and you can just pronounce it like she when reading it aloud or in your head, since she is the underused pronoun anyway.
While 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 go…
Since we almost never do this with programming, I don't believe it can be considered an art as practiced by most programmers. That's not to say you can't use it as art, though! Any medium can be used to express art, because art is flowing out of you constantly. Art and humanities should not be separate classifications. Art is humanity.
As a society, we can build buildings like regular old boxes, so long as it meets our needs for sheltering capacity. We don't do it this way because we've come to appreciate the ability of architects to create a more elegant building (elegant in cost, design, environmental effect).
Most of the programming we do is just building big blocky buildings that most will never see. If we were to spend the time and make it more elegant, we'd only be doing it for ourselves and other programmers, as we are the only ones that can appreciate it for the time being. Trying to simplify code is an art simply because it's unnecessary, but when it's actually achieved, yields some form of value to those that can appreciate it.
I totally agree that programming is an art, but the art lies in the result, not in the "coding style". Who cares how Michelangelo held his brush or his chisel; what matters is what he made.
I can't swear to chisels but brushwork is extremely important to paintings; you really haven't seen a painting until you've gotten up close and been able to see the texture made by the strokes, and while maybe in theory you can achieve everything with a ham-fisted caveman grip on a brush it seems unlikely.
Which is to say, actually many people care about how artists hold their brushes.
This has been another entry in the billion part series: Why Analogies Are The Weakest Arguments.
(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…
Yes, yes, and hell yes.
They are different skills, varying in levels of importance depending on the context.
Not sure how to frame this nicely. The page needs to play better with mobile devices. There is an ever-present back-arrow covering text that gets more obstructive as the page is zoomed. When I decided to follow it to see what was so important that it get in the way, the page it took me to was completely unusable. That aside, I was happy to see that I could actually pinch zoom as some sites block this behavior. Chrome…
Earlier 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
The fascinating thing is that generic he was an ideological construct in the first place, a top-down imposition that never fully caught on in English despite literally centuries of being proclaimed as proper. Singular they continued to be used the whole time, and is found in most (all?) great English writers. (Jane Austen was particularly fond of it.) I don't have citations handy, but people with similar bees in their bonnets have made sure that web searches won't lack for them.
By 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....
The functions of art include philosophical enquiry and invoking a sense of immanence in the receiver, and so on; creating a program might cause some of these things to happen in the programmer, but only as a coincidence. In his poem called The Scent of the Real, Alvin Pang writes "to bear clear witness/to your longing alone/[is] the only art/there is." Software doesn't do it either, other than as a potential medium for visual art or other forms. It seems likely that new, distinctively digital art forms will evolve, but even then it won't be "the programming" that corresponds to "the art".
Achieving simplicity in code is an art. As a society, we can build buildings like regular old boxes, so long as it meets our needs for sheltering capacity. We don't do it this way because we've come to appreciate the ability of architects to create a more elegant building (elegant in cost, design, environmental effect). Most of the programming we do is just building big blocky buildings that most will never see. If w…
By that do you mean that it's difficult to do and you need to practise it? That sounds like a craft. I find it impossible to imagine the Mozart's Requiem or Sistine Chapel of software, much less of programming.