_why's complete printer spool as one book [pdf]

Well there's your first problem.

In that case, could you please name a few artists that you believe did exactly that? I'm honestly interested in finding more of such art. But before you do, let me rephrase what I wrote above, because it's easy to misunderstand one short sentence (and I'm definitely guilty of not explaining very well what I mean): When I talk about art around and about software, I mean

a) art, i.e. not just something beautiful or well-crafted, but something which explores the human condition with an artistic purpose

b) around software, i.e. art that uses code as an integral part of the artwork (not just a painting about programming for example)

c) about software, i.e. it does not only use code to convey something, but code itself is the subject (Code for Code's sake)

I'm honestly not aware of anything that fits this description before _why's work (or at least of nothing that I would consider as art, and yes, that's somewhat hard to define). More concretely, I would exclude any works that simply praise mathematical / structural elegance, perfection or purity. Even though their creators may be artists and use artistic methods, I would hesitate to call such works "Art" with a capital A.

So, games/demos/processing sketches/audi-visual programming/software patterns/etc all do not fit these criteria. They may be very skillful works of art, but none of them tackle the subject of software & code at their core. While many focus on the mathematical perfection in code, _why focused on human imperfection and a creator's struggle while writing code.

I'm not a programmer. I'm barely even a member of this community. You're far more involved in this world than I am; you know names and see projects that never cross my path. My understanding of your world is shallow. I wouldn't blame that on the community, actually; that's all my fault. :-)

Let me argue from a different, slightly better-thought-out angle. It's not that no programmers do artistic things. Indeed, there are fascinating people using code pretty much everywhere, and there have been for decades. What made _why unique was that many of his projects were aimed at introducing new people to programming, in a plethora of different ways which felt more organic and intimate than your average "learn to code" resource. Codecademy, which enjoyed a tremendous success over the last year, struck me as a slightly less whimsical version of _why's TryRuby, which always struck me as particularly ingenious.

Plenty of interesting programmers don't concern themselves much with reading out to amateurs, whereas _why had the (Poignant) Guide and TryRuby and Shoes. And _why wrote, not just about the code itself, but about the culture; some of the most interesting parts of the (Poignant) Guide concerned not the Ruby language, but the Ruby culture, which he made out to be particularly enthusiastic and welcoming. (While he was a member of the community, he did a fantastic job of encouraging young idiots like myself; I received an email from him 5 years ago while I hated my environment and what I was doing and it helped me out tremendously.)

It seemed, and still seems now, like he was making an incredible effort to reach out to a sort of person that normally was turned off by the way programming worked, and convince them to give programming a try anyway. At the same time, the things he said which were critical about the community rang true with those of us who didn't feel like proper parts of it – I, as I've already admitted, am not really a programmer and my approaches to building things tend to run contrary to how most programmers work. Yet with him, and with people who were especially inspired by his work, my way of doing things has felt like a valid and worthwhile approach to making things, and I've been able to feel like a bit more part of a community because of it.

I wish there were more people like _why doing that. The programming world still feels like a cold and forbidding place to those of us who aren't already within it. It's a shame that it feels that way. I don't think that it has to be.

That probably is part of the problem here.

For starters, you could try looking into Jeffrey Shaw & Gideon May.

Netochka Nezvanova is another name that springs to mind (but that likely will not qualify by some of your criteria), the Electronic Disturbance Theater is another.

There are probably 100's if not 1000's of artists that have chosen to use the computer as their medium of choice, usually they don't make the code central to the expression because the code is the vehicle.

But there are definitely artists that craft with the code as their central means of expression.

I feel that by first stating something overbroad and now redefining it in a way that is overly narrow to then be able to say that 'see, nobody fits the exact same niche' is a bit of a cheap trick, after all, _why was just _why, unique, like every other artist. So no, if you keep on adding conditions why nobody was like him or even crafting 'art' you can easily exclude the rest of the world and maintain your claim. But that's a pretty limiting act and it seems like a very technical way to win the argument.

_why was neither the first, the last or particularly special in what he did unless you mean special to be used as 'specific' rather than as a claim to quality. He successfully promoted himself, his art and incidentally the ruby language. But that does not warrant such overbroad claims as were made above.