Some of our best and brightest programmers classify programming as an art (Donald Knuth, Guido van Rossum, and Bjarne Stroustrup to name a few). Depending on who you ask, art is skill, craftsmanship, fine art like painting or sculpture, or perhaps solving problems despite walking blindly through the realm of the unknown. Donald Knuth says in Computer Programming as an Art:
Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.
Interesting... intriguing... but useful? When we hear this premise, programming is an art, what argument is it supporting? Or is it simply an observation devoid of practical value?
Beautiful code?
When the common programmer says programming is an art I believe they usually mean that they strive for beauty in their code. I also believe they are talking about the result, which is the code, not the process, which is the programming. I also define common programmers as programmers who are common in their field. They won't be writing any books and probably not speaking at any conferences but they're smart folks, have significant experience, and they get a lot done. I would put myself in this group.
I wrote beautiful code years ago. My code would have been tweaked repeatedly such that all its components seemed to be where they belonged by the end of my projects. In my gut it felt beautiful, but beautiful really just meant putting like things together. I arrived there without knowing why I was doing what I was doing, how it was good, and how it was bad. I was ignorant of just about every other meaningful attribute of my code.
My ability to compose such beauty created an internal illusion of my own expertise. What I did was working, wasn't it?
Beauty has no value in code
Try putting a monetary value on the beauty of code. How would you come up with such a number? Could you measure it without defining beauty in terms of things like extensibility, testability, readability, or other objectively measurable attributes? It would seem not. If art and beauty are simply imprecise terms for a conglomeration of these objective attributes, does it not detract from our discourse to use them at all?
Beauty is not one thing to all people. It is subjective and as such it is a terrible attribute for comparison. Is the Mona Lisa more beautiful than Jackass 3D? I don't know, I'm sick. Really sick.
Since beauty is subjective, anyone could claim that their code is beautiful and they'd be right and you'd also be right even if you disagreed. Jackass 3D is more beautiful than the Mona Lisa because I said so. It levels the playing field. Differences in coding practices become a matter of personal taste with no connection to real world consequences like expenditure of time and money. That is the true harm in this kind of thinking.
Maybe you write medical software so testability is extremely important. Maybe you write embedded software that will never be changed after its released so maybe you don't care about flexibility or extensibility. Maybe you need to ship your product in 3 days, or maybe 3 years. Maybe your team is junior HTML developers or maybe its programming gods who can flip bits with their minds. Different code attributes will have different business value depending on the changes (or lack there of) that your code will go through in its lifetime and the team that will see to those changes. This business knowledge should inform your coding practices, not some misguided quest for art.
Shit, I work with artists
My advice to those out there trying to make the case for less art and more of a practical approach to coding would be to:
- Analyze the code, coding practices, and tools you use. What makes it hard to meet your business needs? Look at specific cases, because context matters. No silver bullets. No one size fits all. You want to solve a real problem, not sell a religion.
- Avoid arguing minor details. For example, if you think its beneficial to make a big change to your system but you spend all your time arguing whether curly braces should be on the same line or the next line no one will listen to you. Choose your battles. Don't gain the reputation of the code nazi.
- Read about how other people solve problems.