On Friday, December 17, 2010 08:00:25 pm Yu-Hsuan L. wrote:
You imply that our programming craft is too young to be art.
No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying it’s too young to be
recognized as art.
For instance, video games are certainly not too young to be art, and
people
are even starting to recognize them as art, but we still have Roger
Ebert
loudly claiming first that it cannot be “art”, then that it cannot be
“fine
art”, and finally backing off and admitting that he might not have any
right
to say one way or the other without at least playing a single game.
But
programming is growing more quickly than other industries(or sciences).
Maybe fifty years is not short?
Well, first, most great art isn’t recognized within the artists’
lifetime, and
fifty years is a bit too short for, say, _why to die (or disappear) and
then
be recognized by later generations as a genius, unappreciated in his
time.
Quick sort and merge sort and so on is algorithms rather than programming.
What? How are algorithms not programming?
Algorithms are mathematics and mathematics are immutable.
By that logic, all programs are also mathematics, and this has also
been
proven – every program can be reduced to a mathematical expression. Is
that
what you meant?
But then, I also remember my Calculus teacher talking about how
integration is
more an art than a science, so maybe that’s not such a bad thing…
In any case, if programs are more than just math, then algorithms must
be,
also. They are step-by-step instructions, the abstract form of a program
before we translate that algorithm into a particular programming
language. In
that sense, my morning routine – wake up, drink protein shake and
caffinated
pseudo-energy-drink, work out, shower, brush teeth, shave, then get to
where I
need to be – could be seen as an algorithm.
Even more so if we consider it to be a number of rules – for instance,
if I
am running late enough, I may skip everything but the caffeine in order
to get
there on time. If I am on vacation, I may not set my alarm, I may just
sleep
till I feel like getting up. Now we’re getting closer to an actual
algorithm
– if I worked at it, I’m sure I could come up with a reasonable
flowchart for
how I wake up.
Nothing about it is “immutable”, either. Sure, if I changed one aspect
of my
morning routine – say I decide to drink tea instead, cut back on the
caffeine
– it wouldn’t be the same routine it was before. But nothing about it
is
“immutable”. I can certainly take existing algorithms, adapt them, and
come up
with new versions – one trivial optimization of QuickSort, for
instance, is
to drop to insertion sort when the partitions get small enough. It’s not
exactly the same QuickSort, but I don’t think anyone would try to claim
it’s
not QuickSort.
Even we have
non-Euclidean geometry, every student learns Pythagorean theorem first. But
still CS students learn Fortran? Some of them even don’t want C language.
I’m not sure how this is relevant.
Now my opinion is like the essay Arcieri posted.
It was interesting, and maybe I’ve lost a bit of respect for Paul
Graham, but
I do still think programming can be art. Maybe most of it isn’t, but
then most
writing isn’t art either. Certainly, no one would argue that we can’t
have
things like poetry, or even beautiful enough prose that the language
itself is
art. But I am by no means claiming that what I’m writing here is art,
either.