[epolanski]

> Programming is a higher art than painting or music.

No it's not, and it is imho a delusion to think otherwise.

Programming is engineering, it is about finding the best solution based on a series of requirements (performance, readability, time, etc).

There's very little creativity involved in programming as it is the case with pretty much any engineering field.

I don't understand this narrative of making it seem a creative activity which is not. That's not to say that it is #completely# void of creativity or "beauty", but I just dont believe this narrative of it being "art". And comparing it to painting or music is straight up circlejerk material.

In the end for every single argument you can give for programming being art, l can just answer you that it applies even move to math. Is math art?

[bullen]

In the long term all audio/visual art is going to devalue in the face of programming because making things go has more value, and programming uses graphics and sounds to make them move, without programming textures, polygons and sound waves are just meaningless... Artists have always used technology: canvas, paintbrush, instrument, etc. But eventually the technology itself becomes the meaning.

You can see this in game programmers that only use technology to draw/play (shaders, proc. gen. etc.). The medium becomes the media!

I understand it is hard to see now, since humans take a long time adapting to things but this 50 year old craft (the youngest craft we have and possibly the last ever to be discovered by humans) will eventually be the master craft once programmers realize they don't need companies to earn value that allow them to pay for real physical things.

It will take time, but in the large perspective of civilizations it will happen in a heartbeat, historians will write that it allready happened!

[Jensson]

> There's very little creativity involved in programming as it is the case with pretty much any engineering field.

It depends on the context. If you program for bigco then there isn't much creativity. But if you draw imagines or make music for bigco there wont be much creativity either, they will want standard stuff done as cleanly and quickly as possible. However when you are programming whatever you feel like to make an enjoyable program then that is art, similarly to how someone who draws freely to make a picture that is enjoyable to look at is art.

When you got an idea for a program in your head then you go and program it as efficiently as possible. But that is exactly the same thing as an artist with an imagine in their head, they will try to draw that image as efficiently and accurately as possible as well. There is no difference here. The only difference is that programming is harder to work with and you can do more things with it. You can draw images with code, but you can also do so much more.

Made an algorithm that made pixels behave like water and is cool to look at? Great! Now make a whole game around that concept! Even greater! You can't say stuff like this isn't art.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/881100/Noita/

[nextaccountic]

Yes, math is art! Math is worldbuilding, one theory at time. There's an astounding amount of creativity that goes in our definitions and proofs.

One could instead consider that math already exists, and we are just discovering it; but this is as useful as saying that all images already exist (in the set of all pixel matrices) and digital painters are just discovering images that were already there all the time.

The end result isn't all that matters; it also matters how we get there.

[meheleventyone]

This is an incredibly depressing view of math, programming and engineering. Strandbeest is a great example of physical engineering as art. Neither discipline needs to be relentlessly practical and dull. If you must though think what happens when some of your requirements have more whimsy.