[NetBehaviour] Art and Computer Programming

[marc]

*Art and Computer Programming*
by John Littler
06/30/2005

Art and hand-waving are two things that a lot of people consider to go 
very well together. Art and computer programming, less so. Donald Knuth 
put them together when he named his wonderful multivolume set on 
algorithms The Art of Computer Programming, but Knuth chose a 
craft-oriented definition of art (PDF) in order to do so.
Is Programming Art?

What the heck is art anyway, at least as most people understand it? What 
do people mean when they say "art"? A straw poll showed a fair degree of 
consensus--art is craft plus a special degree of inspiration. This 
pretty much explains immediately why only art students and art critics 
at a certain sort of paper favor conceptual art. Conceptual art, of 
course, often lacks a craft component as people usually understand the term.

My goal here is to discover whether programming is art and whether 
there's anything useful to discover by regarding it as an art. Can the 
concept get us out of tight corners or resolve issues? Can it help to 
produce killer apps?

My goal is also to find out what some accomplished programmers think. To 
do this, I sent out the following email:

I'm putting together an article for O'Reilly on the subject "art in 
programming" which was prompted by Donald Knuth's three volume set in 
which "art" is pretty much defined as craft ... which is pretty much not 
the modern definition of the word for a lot of people.
    
more...
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/30/artofprog.html

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