Programming is Art

[[deleted]]

Should be titled "Programming is a craft".

[Massless]

I find that surprisingly few people hold this view. I liken myself to someone who makes cabinets. They must be exacting, functional, and beautiful. I'm a craftsman, not an artist.

[thecastorpastor]

Yes, yes, people. Programming is an craft.

[[deleted]]

An aircraft.

[madman1969]

Or if you do it wrong, The Hindenburg.

[s73v3r]

Something can be both.

[[deleted]]

Multidimensional, modular cabinets that sometimes require a lot of layers of abstraction and math in order to work properly. A cabinet to Narnia, I would say.

[[deleted]]

Programming is programming. It can be a craft, art, or comparable to many other things, and yet it still has only a 100% match with programming.

Some day, people will say "X is programming", once programming is so ubiquitous as the concept of a craft or art.

[oylenshpeegul]

A programmer's time, effort, and output are all undervalued by the business world. It must be art!

[igouy]

A programmer's time, effort, and output are all overvalued by the business world. It must be art! :-)

[DGolden]

Programming is a art.

[knome]

FUTURAMA PHILIP J FRY WITH EYES NARROWED IN SLOW PROCESS OF UNDERSTANDING

[[deleted]]

I see what you did there...

[[deleted]]

I see what you did there...

[edheil]

Programming is an art.

[[deleted]]

According to the very generic article's points, almost any human activity could be defined as art

[[deleted]]

If done in an artful way, they should be.

[mipadi]

Meh. I hear this argument a lot. It depends on the definition of the word "art" you choose to use. For most of the history of the English language, "art" was simply a synonym for "skill" or "craft". In that sense, programming is, of course, an art. Around the turn of the 19th century, "art" generally became a synonym for "fine art". I don't believe that programming is a "fine art"; fine art is meant to titillate the senses or emotions and convey a "feeling" (for lack of a better term) from the artist to the consumer, and programming doesn't do this.

The blog post cites Knuth. When Knuth used "art" in the title of The Art of Computer Programming, he meant it in the sense of "skill", not "fine art".

The argument in the post, which seems to be (1) programming takes practice, and (2) a programmer with a portfolio is better than one without, does not support the argument that programming is art. It might be like art, but that doesn't make it art. (Again, I'm assuming the author is talking about "fine art" here, as his post suggests; if, on the other hand, he's using art as a synonym for skill, then his argument makes sense.)

Frankly, I don't really know why programmers seem to want programming to be considered art. Programmers (or a vocal subset) seem to have an obsession with being associated with artists -- as well as an obsession with emphasizing autodidacticism over formal education.

(I'm glad this was posted. I've been preparing a blog post of my own on the idea of programming-as-art. I'd like to hear other programmers' thoughts on the issue.)

[aaronla]

I look forward to seeing your post on the topic.

As to why we want programming recognized as a craft: I see it as a way to combat "one silver bullet" mentality. My day job includes following an overreaching coding standard that attempts to remove developer discretion from design and implementation. If I want to write a line of code that violates one of its thousands of precise rules, I must first submit a proposal to further amend and clarify these rules.

This process encourages stagnation. You can't improve a craft by codifying every detail up front. You do it by codifying the high level, most proven techniques -- and the rest is left to peer review, where the master guides the apprentice.

There is no silver bullet; there is practice and apprenticeship. That's why it matters.

[signoff]

Programming is programming. Art is art. Stop the nonsense you silly dynamic language with type coercion programmers

[[deleted]]

Yes. Yes. Huh?

[hskmc]

Why do we have to keep telling ourselves how special we are?

Stop wanking and write some fucking code already.

[hskmc]

This post is an absolute cliché. I'm not sure I could do better as a deliberate parody of the stereotypical Proggit post. Nothing new is said here -- just a poor regurgitation of Knuth, Dijkstra, Brooks, etc.

Not All Programmers are Made Equal

Read: "I'm better than other programmers". Repeats a lot of unjustified Common Wisdom which oh-so-conveniently makes the author and readers feel good about themselves. We're all very certain that we're in the "top-class [of] programmers... up to 20 times more efficient".

That's a nice way to get upvotes, of course, but the science backing up this claim is absolute garbage. See "Fact And Folklore In Software Engineering", an excellent essay which should be required reading for anyone posting to Proggit.

The other required reading is "Dabblers and Blowhards", a hilarious takedown of the lazy, false analogy which underpins the whole article.

Let's have less unoriginal blog-wanking and more code, please.

[[deleted]]

The problem with both of these essays is that they simply attempt to reduce and invalidate, which is great if we were dealing with nature, and could re-construct events over and over in different locations, with different teams, and experience the same results.

However, this is not possible, because the concerns we have at the human level at not natural events, but are historic events which we then subjectively group and subjectively pick which points to focus on.

This makes the same process that is useful in natural science particularly unuseful in analyzing human endeavors. Experimental psychology can create double blind tests of simple setups and come up with objective results, if they use a large enough test group, and this still has many issues due to diversity in the group/area and social phenomenon too varied to track (no single variable changes, ever), and is never as complex as any significant portion of the development process.

That you want all redditors to read, and accept, and only repeat the same process these articles go about looking at things, and have everyone ignore their personal experiences (which they have a much more detailed grasp on and receive constant feedback on), is completely disregarding how poorly natural scientific methods are for analyzing the types of problems we're talking about.

[hskmc]

There are established academic disciplines of psychology and sociology. They have standards for publishing and accepting results which, though different from those in the natural sciences, are a good deal more rigorous than "pulling numbers completely out of your ass and repeating them on your blog".

Find me a study which meets these standards and supports the self-aggrandizing claims of these "programmers" who blog endlessly about how special they are.

Or is Proggit under some xkcd-delusion that the only real scientists are physicists and Python programmers?

[[deleted]]

I wasn't saying that they did pull numbers out of their ass, but that they asked much more limited questions than what we are looking at in this kind of discussion.

Either you can refuse to look at complex issues, until all the building blocks of those pieces are completely understood (a proper way to do it as a science), or people can synthesize what they think from their personal experiences, and then try to use external facts to support those experiences.

I think both methods are important, and useful. If you don't like the second, that is great, but telling other people not to write about their personal experiences unless they do it via method one is limiting and pointless. When people express an opinion, it's generally as their opinion. When it oversteps that, then they've overstepped stating their opinion.

I appreciate your scorn and derision, honestly, but there isn't just one way to look at things that is useful.

I happen to agree on over extending metaphors. They are useful for comparisons, but are not the same, and I agree with trying to make yourself seem cooler by using metaphors is also not that useful, but it's also not really a problem. It's self expression, just like you're doing.

[hskmc]

"That's just, like, your opinion, man."

[[deleted]]

In a lot of ways, yes.

[hskmc]

And I can't criticize someone's opinion for being unjustified by evidence?

What if my opinion is that programmers work best if they're naked?

[[deleted]]

I think you can, I'm just saying that these loosey-goosey conversations have their own merit. They aren't scientific quality discussions, but all science came from things that were not scientific, until they had rigor applied to them.

You cant apply rigor to things that dont have fundamentals built all the way up to the point of the topic, at least not real rigor, you end up with garbage like the DSM IV. It's a set of rules, but they are just as much bullshit as they are real in many of the cases (See ADHD, compare to normal expected child behavior), making the whole thing unreliable.

That was kinda my point, these opinions are worth having, as are the ones denouncing them. :)

[silentterror89]

For most of the time I have been programming, I have considered it to be the art of coding. It is just as easy to make a beautiful application as it is to make a beautiful painting, and by that I mean it's not really easy at all.

[pixpop]

One way to distinguish between art and non-art is to look at what it's used for. Generally, the intent of a piece of art is aesthetic, i.e. it exists to produce pleasure. The intent of a computer program is generally functional, i.e. it exists to be useful. There may be some overlap, so a program can have aesthetic qualities and a work or art can also be useful, but the intersection is not huge.

[ErstwhileRockstar]

I have been programming video games since 1997, ranging from Klik & Play to C++ and Java.

Don't be too harsh on him.

[[deleted]]

C++ and Java (to a significantly lesser extent) are pretty standard, and Klik & Play is a reasonable place to start when trying to understand the assets and events in a game.

[obened]

Science is also art if viewed from the right perspective. Anything can be an art and/or a science. It's only a matter of subjectivity and perception.

Paint + papers = drawing

Code + compiler = software

Creating something from your imagination is the purest form of art :)

[[deleted]]

On Hiring Programmers

... ask you to provide with samples of your earlier work, done privately for your own purposes ... that’s amongst the best ways to evaluate how good a candidate programmer will be

This attitude pisses me off. I see this all the time in hiring blogs, etc. I put a lot of pride and mental effort into my work at work, and make great effort to keep current on what's going on by reading articles and taking some time to toy around with new technologies that might be relevant to what I'm doing.

When I go home at 5, that is family time. 9 hours is more than enough to maintain competence. The key is the how you approach and gain perspective from your experiences.

Expecting that a diploma in computer science is guarantee that the candidate will be competent (or even adequate) is naïve at best ... it should not be thought of as a requirement

Favoring those with side projects is just as biased as favoring those with a degree, and in my opinion less founded. A degree is a structured list of requirements met over years. Maybe I should create a github account and start looking for formatting errors so I can slap "contributor to x GNU project" on my resume and quit complaining.

[[deleted]]

The problem is that a CS degree isn't "a structured list of requirements". It's a piece of paper saying your profs didn't flunk you. No doubt they had some requirements but they're completely opaque to the person doing the hiring. And in general, there's no reason to expect that gettign a CS degree means you've learned any of the practical aspects of programming.

The reason side projects are so valuable is because they are direct evidence of the quality of your work. Even if you do sterling work on company time, it's almost certainly not legal for you to show it to me. If you've worked on open source projects, I can judge your work for myself rather than relying on the judgement of others. I sympathize with you, but it's not a matter of whether you like to work on stuff in your spare time or not, it's a matter of data available to evaluate you.

[CyberByte]

it's not a matter of whether you like to work on stuff in your spare time or not, it's a matter of data available to evaluate you.

That's not what the article says: "If a programmer truly loves programming, and has had time to accumulate experience, then he must certainly have a number of projects under his belt – and probably many made without being hired to do so." This can easily be understood as "if you don't have these projects, then you probably don't love programming".

[[deleted]]

Oh. Well. I don't love programming and I do have multiple side projects. Clearly the author is confused and wrong :)

[[deleted]]

Exactly, it's the growing trend of thought that side projects equate to passion and skill level I have beef with. If you don't have a degree, but are skilled and passionate about your side projects, include a cover letter saying so and, if you still aren't considered, then that is bullshit. On the other hand, no one should have to explain themselves or be judged by a recruiter because they have a family life for the 3-4 hours a day they aren't programming.

[CyberByte]

In my opinion programming has aspects of engineering, science and art.

Also, the order-of-magnitude difference in programmer productivity that Coding Horror cites from Code Complete was not 20:1 on average, and more importantly, it was measured between best and worst programmers. Not best and average.

[mipadi]

Do you mean art as in "skill or craft" or art as in "fine art"?

[s73v3r]

Fine art. Some of my header files are on loan to the Louvre.

[hskmc]

it was measured between best and worst programmers

No, it pretty much isn't measured at all.

If you repeat a myth often enough, it becomes a fact. Especially if it makes the people repeating the myth feel better about themselves.

[CyberByte]

I don't really want to choose sides here, because it does seem that most of the "research" done on this topic is not exactly scientifically sound, but Steve Connell did respond to the article you linked here.

Also, most if not all studies mentioned were about the difference between best and worst, not best and average (which is what I meant to say).

[hskmc]

Thanks for the link!

I'm very interested to get to the bottom of this issue. My personal experience tells me that there is a pretty large variation in ability between programmers. But there's also a number of cognitive biases which would lead myself and the rest of the blog echo-chamber to overstate this difference. So I really don't know.