Programming Isn't Special

When something is brought into the world through human intention, it has the possibility of being art. A human must stand next to it and say "This is mine."

The human role in the creation of art is non-negotiable.

I am a programmer who likes aesthetics. I think about how aesthetic it is to not have to deal with certain production incidents for certain blocks of code because the typelevel computation tells me it would be a compiler bug if it screwed up. I like the feeling of realizing those 100 LOC could just be 10.

I sometimes tell people of when I came down from Mt. Fuji, there were wispy clouds and grand nature below me, picturesque like a painting. At that time, I likened it to the beauty I felt when I was first learning Haskell. But I say it because I expect it to be a rare kind of sentiment.

The thing with art and music is that they are easy to appreciate, and the appreciation grows deeper with more consideration. I love reading the placards in museums and attempting to understand why the artist did what they did, I like it more than even looking at the piece itself.

Code (and math, for that matter) is almost the same except for one key difference: they are not easy to appreciate without deliberate training, training which is often far to the side of anything most people need/want to deal with.

Programming as an art form always reminds me of the Einstein quote; "Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas". Both are just art forms you cannot appreciate without some understanding of it. Arguably thats true of all art actually, its just that the more familiar forms, like painting or music, can be understood at a basic level without an understanding, whereas mathematics and programming are essentially alien to the casual observer.

I am so fascinated about this angle -- whether programming is art or not. This is one of the things that got me to HN recently and I love reading these discussiong as a non-programmer.

While I love art, I am not an art historian or critic, so the definition I have for it is highly subjective -- in my opinion one of the functions of art is communication with other people (often through time and space). For art to fulfill its telos, so to speak, the message that it carries must also be read (heard, perceived) by somebody and then, if it's great art, eventually someone would want to respond to it.

The message can be simple, complex, subversive, stupid, clever, it can be an observation about world, a joke, a profound truth, a memory, a question, a snapshot, a curiosity, a trick, and a ton of other things. And sure, the message can be distorted, misunderstood, twisted, forgotten, lost, etc, but if no one "reads" it and no one "talks" to it, it might as well be glossolalia.

So my question for folks who do consider programming art -- do you "read" other people's code like this? Do you exchange ideas through code? Have you ever trolled great coders of the past through your code or tried to prove them wrong?

I hope my question doesn't come off as complete nonsense.

P.s. I know that there are programming manifestos which to me sounds like there is a layer of meaning that the code carries and this meaning goes beyond pure machine instructions or software functionality, but I'd love to read answers of actual programmers.

I wish I could find the quote, I think it was on C2 Wiki, but alas, it was something like:

If you're an artist, programming is your clay, if you're an engineer, programming is your building material.

Point being, which I always connected with, was that programming is a medium for expressing a lot of things. Just like you can use paper and pen to write poetry or a dry technical manual. And everyone gets to decide how they see it and use it.

Programming is special in the sense that it is one of those direct experiences of mere language instructions being used to make things work - a form that resembles sorcery and witchcraft of the old times.

Of course there are many other indirect instances of language being used as the primary tool to move, but programming happens to be a direct raw unadulterated first hand experience into building things with nothing but raw language primitives.

Where code is ideas willed into existence.

Said this in a thread already but bears repeating at the top level:

Coding is not Programming

Coding is certainly a highly adjacent skill to programming, but coding is not the same as programming.

To quote Leslie Lamport: "coding is to programming as typing is to writing."

I strongly agree that programming is art, but I think there's a difference between other art forms.

A novel is both how it's made and what it is, and so is a piece of music.

Programming produces two different outputs: the code and the program. What users consume, and care about, is the program. The code may or may not be read by other programmers but it's not the main output. (It would be extremely weird to output code in a language that can't ever be run.)

And so I think the beauty or effectiveness of the program matters more than the beauty or elegance of the code. Those are not entirely orthogonal of course, but only loosely coupled.

A programmer should care a lot about the program, and a little less about the code. Vibe programming (where the programmer doesn't care one way or another) to me is a crime; but you can certainly use AI to code, and still care about the finished product, and make it good.

Before AI, some programming could be considered be considered art. There are definitely codebases that are more beautiful than others. But now with introduction of AI you can’t consider any code as art as you have no idea who produced it. Yes, it may be looking good, but from that perspective it’s just randomly produced without the thought of being art. And at some point it will be refactored into oblivion by something that doesn’t care.

We’re in automation. The point of programming is not to do the same thing again.

The role of a developer (and most IT roles), at its core, is to make yourself obsolete, move on, rinse and repeat.

Feature / scope creep may have blindsided some.

I’m happy most programming is going away. I was capable but now I’m even more capable at creating solutions. The art will stay.

I agree, and I've considered my code to be art for a long while. Take for example my coffeescript parser: https://github.com/jaekwon/JoeScript/blob/master/src/joescri...

This is art.

And I have much love for good frameworks and design.

I'm fortunate to have started gno.land before AI, yet just late enough to finish it with AI. The GnoVM (gno.land) is also art -- go interpreting go, but in a novel multiuser context, a re-imagining of TBL's WWW in Go and markdown. AI was used for final touch polishing. Couldn't have ended up any better.

AI is not yet there to grok the artistry of code. But it will eventually, and humanity will benefit from it necessarily, not because it is demanded, but because people like us desire it. Push forward.

Well written article.

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p.s. plug: gno.world, find me there.

Programming is special, as it's basically translation on steroids.

I don't know what other profession weaves so many levels of abstraction to get to the final product.

Programming can be art in the way that cooking can be art.

Most of it is in fact NOT art but simply done to solve a problem.

Are there simply two cultures among programmers? Along similar lines as the two cultures of mathematics? One motivated by the process itself, by esthetics, by abstractions, ideas. The other by solving problems. And then obviously these two cultures react very differently to AI.

I don't know, I learned to like agentic programming. It felt intimidating at first, but now I fully embraced it. Granted I am still anxious what will happen to the developer job market, but for my own projects agentic programming has been a god send.

I don't see it. Programming CAN be used to generate art, but is not an art by itself.

I cannot imagine lines of code be exhibited in a museum. I can appreciate smart or witty solutions for a problem, but that is not what art is. I can appreciate a quick solution for a Rubik cube, I can even see the Rubik cube itself in a museum, but I cannot imagine the steps or instructions for that quick solution in a museum (unless that paper has historical significance).

Apparently, neither is coherent writing.

People in this thread not reading the article and expressing their point of "the 10th api you've written for a business is not art" as if the points of mundanity are not addressed in the article is infuriating.

Programming isn't special, definitely. Programming can be art, writing can be art, painting can be art.

Most programming isn't art, just like most writing, most painting, etc isn't. The programming you do in your day job very probably isn't art. The programming you do for a demoscene program, in my opinion, definitely is.

I think you can agree or disagree with this post; I expect most to disagree now, though I agree.

But either way, look at how readable this post is, and consider whether AI-powered writing gets even slightly close to that ability to provoke agreement or disagreement.

I instinctively want to agree with this but I feel like there's some pretty jarring logical jumps made to equate programming to the more obvious art forms that people put time into ~because~ they want to artistically express themselves.

What the author really wants to say isn't "programming isn't special" but that "programming is art to the same extent as music or painting because people do both things for money within capitalism" which I just don't think holds up.

> Programming isn’t special. It’s just Art, and Art is the most human — and thus, the most universal — thing that there is.

The OP may be fortunate to have worked on stuff that required some kind of artistic thinking, but the vast majority of code produced—as the vast majority of illustrations—is not art but a means to an end, namely providing value to users and stakeholders, and to generate profits.

So much of what's going on with a lot of open source community reaction to AI is often just gatekeeping masquerading as morality.

Many of us have spent our adult and teenage lives learning an arcane magic that we took pride and joy and status in. Only to find now it's not so magic anymore. Or not in the way we thought.

I often see parts of my own code as art. Especially when I was younger, I guess.

But I also saw lots of it as: making a living. And there's fluidity between the two.

They're right "programming isn't special" -- it's not the magic you thought it was. It never was. It just appeared magic because others couldn't do it.

You can still have that magic in pockets. But you shouldn't expect to be venerated for it. You never should have.

I've been doing it for 40+ years at this point. I'm happy to let the machines take over a lot of the grunt work so I can get one with making beautiful interesting systems. I can make all things I wanted to make now.

Art is special. Programming... no, get over yourself. You can see it that way. Not everyone else has to. And playing Butlerian Jihad isn't going to dam the flood.

The post is well intentioned, but misses the point.

While you can engage in the act of programming from the angle of craft and while you may have started to code because you really enjoyed how it felt like solving a puzzle, programming is primarily a profession. It is a lot closer to accounting than to painting.

There is still space for coding without AI, stuff like advent of code, etc. While it may sound old fashioned as a lot of people did it to practice code challenge for interviews, some did that simply for the pleasure of coding.

But when your job is working in some system for a corporation, big or small, there's no space there for craft or passion, just the reality that what matters is the sausage, not what went into making it.

You may (and probably should) still care about certain engineering principles; correctness, performance, readability, maintainability, etc. But that's about it, whether you write the code or an LLM does is immaterial.

Why is this flagged? I find it a fair essay. Why do philistines get to spoil all the fun around here?

Edit: why would anyone flag tfa? There is no anti-flag vote right?

"Artists understand that AI is bad for art." Art is in the eye of the beholder, don't tell me what makes for bad art.

You know what AI is bad for? Menu's. Our butcher just send out a pamphlet with discounts for the week. There is sushi on it that looks like plastic covered in slabs of candle wax, inside is avocado but only at first glance, when you look closer it looks more like a mushy bean. The nori looks covered in sesame seeds, but on closer inspection the seeds form a network, like a fungus. In my head I can just feel the horrible mouthfeel when I look at the image. Weird that I find it so disgusting. It seems that some people do, some don't really see the problem with it.

I also recently say on a banner on a Vietnamese restaurant a shrimp.. But only at first glance, because a shrimp is not a full taurus, like a pink striped donut.

> what it’s doing to our industry, but we are using it anyway

Other industries are using it too. It's quite delusional to assume that just because people hate something they won't use it.

sounds like art people clueless about engineering again

And also we do worry, but not in "replacement" way but just "using AI to create bad code with no proper oversight". It's absolutely enabling clueless to develop crap apps

To many, it is just another tool in the toolbox to solve a problem, to get from A to B. I find coding rewarding, in the same way I find puzzles rewarding. But if I had any advise, it would be not to let it define you as a person.

> Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?

imo, that's happening because 2 cultures formed under extremely opposite incentives - "I do stuff and anyone else also doing it is taking my money away from me" vs "Please someone else do same thing as me, it would be so awesome/easier"

the closest art-relating thing to GPL ideals are fanfics. And opinion about ai-generated fanfics has been much closer to our coders view - "sure a lot of it is bad, maybe there's also too much of it, but... there's also some good stuff, so it's good?"

I think that AI is the best thing that happened to art. It elevated _all_ human art to this mystical realm. All human work became sacred, as it is unique and bears the Secret Fire. Whatever you do as "art", as long as you didn't use AI, it automatically bears the sacral stamp. Can go to a gallery, whatever. All human art is now elite art.

Here come a thread where those with stock in AI and AI glazers will agree with the title and put forth their claims as if they're obvious and factual, and those against it will do the opposite.

Very stinky topic to be honest and all the posts here are basically the same level of drivel as political discussions.

This should not be flagged.

Why was this flagged?

I don't think there is anything here for me anymore.

Programming is different from art or writing in that nobody gives a fuck about the code, only the results—the benefits it brings them. Programming is an industrial process, not an art form.

Ten years from now "programmer" will describe machines and mechanical processes, not people, in a tradition similar to what happened with "computer" after the 1940s.

Nah. Programming is utilitarian, not artistic. While programmers can do their best to produce elegant, well-ordered and designed code they are producing a means to an end: the program has a purpose beyond being elegant, well-ordered and designed. If the clankers can produce programs which fulfil the same purpose and can do it reliably while taking less time and resources - a big if - they are the way to go for most programs. Cameras largely replaced painters for the purpose of producing portraits, photographers control the cameras to make them produce the desired outcome. Clankers will largely replace programmers for the purpose of producing code, we may need a new term to indicate the humans who control them.