It seems like the engineering and the painting communities appreciate similar ideals. Most successful representational visual art is organized into large simple shapes, with just the right amount of detail added in to be convincing (but not more!). One example that stands out to me is John Singer Sargent, who would obsessively simplify his paintings--walking back from the canvas after each brush stroke to see how all the abstractions coalesce into realism from a distance. This isn't so different than some programmers' dedication to economical expression of algorithms (e.g. the functional programming crowd), or engineers' admiration for the conciseness of the Lua interpreter (a compiler, VM, and runtime in 20000 sloc, and ansi C no less!).
It seems like the engineering and the painting communities appreciate similar ideals. Most successful representational visual art is organized into large simple shapes, with just the right amount of detail added in to be convincing (but not more!). One example that stands out to me is John Singer Sargent, who would obsessively simplify his paintings--walking back from the canvas after each brush stroke to see how all the abstractions coalesce into realism from a distance. This isn't so different than some programmers' dedication to economical expression of algorithms (e.g. the functional programming crowd), or engineers' admiration for the conciseness of the Lua interpreter (a compiler, VM, and runtime in 20000 sloc, and ansi C no less!).
Exactly, simplicity is the key.