“You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative profession. It’s logic-based creativity.” – John Romero...
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In Alan Cooper's closing keynote address "How Far Have We Come?" at Agile08 conference, he discuss this very topic.
He ponders whether programming is art, science, engineering, or craft. (It is a fabulous presentation. I highly recommend reading through it.)
Great read, thank you!
I was a painter, that was art. This is better than art, it's useful.
I would also add that we, programmers, do classify things into objects and break up something big in a lot of small pieces and then connect them between each other. We are good in Ran's test and that shows that we are good in abstraction thinking. Of course there's a lot of patterns and programmers often tend to follow them and imply one or another in their projects. However, programmers can encounter new problem, when they can't just get by those pattern. And it's time where coders apply their knowledge from different aspects to solve the problem, to come up with something new, they have never happen to do. If it's not creativity, then I have no idea what it is.
"When art comes into being as a form of self-expression, we easily recognize it on museum galleries or concert halls. When it is pursued within a methodology, we call it science.
Programming has elements of both."
Excerpt from:
The Psychology of Becoming a Developer
David Quintero 📿 ・ Apr 26 ・ 4 min read
IMO: it's a continuum from pure science (think of formal proofs of validity in Z for safety critical software) to pure art (demoscene contributions, humans riffing on machines for fun). most of us are somewhere in the middle, wanting to express creativity but needing to write unit tests too :)
There can be artistry in testing too, but unit testing does seem to be soul destroying. 😉
Yes, it's art, cause it allows us to test systems to do something that can be fun or interesting. You can create music and sing rock song that is a fizzbuzz program. You can look at this, it's awesome called The Art of Code which can be mind-blowing. especially the first 1/4 of it.
I always think of DHH's thoughts when exploring such ideas:
We're not software engineers, we're software writers.
Thinking about this perspective and having such a mindset does help you write code better, and therefore create better art which benefits all.
An art magazine that publishes code as art - code-art.xyz/issues/
Nice, not sure they quite get the 'code' bit though - available in print or PDF... perhaps they should take inspiration from PoC||GTFO (NB: NSFW title!), where some of the downloads are executable.. even the PDFs - sheer genius :)
Yes, it is more art than science.
You can write the same program in many ways. As in art, there is no clear way to do it. It really depends on who you are and what your craft is.
I go by: Not every graphical representation is seen as "art"; some of maths/science is art - I get the same feelings from their contemplation.
Code is maths.