I agree wholeheartedly! As Donald Knuth would be pointing out, programming is an art, not a science.
Our entire history is built on the shenanigans of the MIT AI Lab, hacker culture, and a general attitude of playful experimentation. That is what we are.
(Not that I ever take Uncle Bob too seriously to begin with; this just further reinforces that stance.)
I believe that it is much harder to answer the question "what is art", then the question "what is programming" (I mean in another way than Knuth said it). But I'm not gonna argue about that
Art is easily defined. Art is anything put in a frame which says, this frame contains art. For example, an art gallery is just such a frame. I highly recommend 'The Square' for reference:-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Square_(...
I like the definition by Scott McCloud. Art is anything you do beyond surviving e.g. if you do something which is not required for your surviving this is art. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And in all irony, we humans have survived without computers for centuries. So, by that definition, art.
(I'm being pretty solidly tongue-in-cheek now; I know there are computers that are needed for life-critical operations, and anyway, that was deliberately false deductive reasoning on my part just now.)
I believe that it is much harder to answer the question "what is art"...
Well said, actually.
I think the overall point is pretty simple: programming is entirely too wibbly-wobbly to be confined to a science. Too nebulous and resistant to solid quantification. There's science in it, like there's science in all art, but "science" doesn't quite define the whole thing.
Or maybe the problem is that we assume science is better defined than it is?
I do love a paradox.
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I agree wholeheartedly! As Donald Knuth would be pointing out, programming is an art, not a science.
Our entire history is built on the shenanigans of the MIT AI Lab, hacker culture, and a general attitude of playful experimentation. That is what we are.
(Not that I ever take Uncle Bob too seriously to begin with; this just further reinforces that stance.)
I believe that it is much harder to answer the question "what is art", then the question "what is programming" (I mean in another way than Knuth said it). But I'm not gonna argue about that
Art is easily defined. Art is anything put in a frame which says, this frame contains art. For example, an art gallery is just such a frame. I highly recommend 'The Square' for reference:-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Square_(...
I like the definition by Scott McCloud. Art is anything you do beyond surviving e.g. if you do something which is not required for your surviving this is art.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And in all irony, we humans have survived without computers for centuries. So, by that definition, art.
(I'm being pretty solidly tongue-in-cheek now; I know there are computers that are needed for life-critical operations, and anyway, that was deliberately false deductive reasoning on my part just now.)
Well said, actually.
I think the overall point is pretty simple: programming is entirely too wibbly-wobbly to be confined to a science. Too nebulous and resistant to solid quantification. There's science in it, like there's science in all art, but "science" doesn't quite define the whole thing.
Or maybe the problem is that we assume science is better defined than it is?
I do love a paradox.