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Comment by JDiculous | Hacker News Reader

Programming involves very little creativity compared to actual art, so to call it a "creative art" is a gross exaggeration.

A programmer is given a very specific set of tasks (eg. send data from A to B, fix bug, implement X), and his problems are mostly technical. This doesn't even compare to the creativity involved in a real artistic endeavor like designing your own videogame, writing your own screenplay, or composing a song. The latter is totally open-ended, and chances are that whatever you create will be way more unique than the 10,000th CRUD app written in the hottest web stack (React/Redux/Sass, or whatever the cool kids are into these days).

Lack of creativity is actually one of my biggest complaints with this field.

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That's only a partial view. I could also say...many paintings that are considered art these days...big whooop they were just work for hire with specifications. Paint that daughter of this rich dude. Same for classical music...we need some new song to wow people at our event...Mr. Bach, we need some new church music get going mate.

I'd say most interesting programming tasks certainly have elements of interesting artistic tasks. They usually involve a problem that is hard to put in words but needs solving. Especially in the startup context it's fairly close to art (imo) since your canvas is so empty...often you don't even know if you're working on the right problem to boot and will only find out through a process.

>A programmer is given a very specific set of tasks (eg. send data from A to B, fix bug, implement X), and his problems are mostly technical.

I don't think this is a fair comparison. This is actually one of those cases where I like the distinction between "programmer" and "coder". What you're describing sounds like a "coder" or a "code monkey," not at all like what I do in my job. If you were to translate this job over to art, it would be something like tracing over lines, making very minor touchups to pre-specified areas, or perhaps mixing paint.

An artist who has complete freedom over their tools and their subjects would best translate to a programmer who also has complete control over their tools and their subject. They are not beholden to a company for specifics, except perhaps that something actually gets built. More likely this is one person who has an idea for a project and designs and implements everything themselves - and spends more time considering what features to add, the best way to add them, or otherwise experimenting with techniques, than actually writing production code.

Programming and coding are the same thing. I think the distinction you were looking for was engineer vs. programmer/coder, and programming is simply the implementation part.

What you described seems more like a managerial role and/or an engineering role that also encompasses product/UI design. In my experience, most of the design work - the actual creative part - is delegated to other people, and the actual implementation of these designs is the task of the engineer. As engineers, we're working on the least creative part.

Perhaps I've just been lucky with jobs, but my daily work hasn't been "send data from A to B, fix bug" since my first job before college (except for ramp-up time when I was just starting at Google, and even then my manager was like "Do you really want to just be fixing unit tests?". It was "Give quants a development environment where they can quickly write algorithms that will run on our parallel-processing cluster", "Visualize violations of Reg NMS for the SEC", "Let teenagers build their own casual games through a WYSIWYG interface and share them with their friends", "Redesign the Google Search Results Page", "Figure out who wrote what on the Internet", "Make webapps perform as well as native ones", and "Fix unemployment" (along with some newer startup ideas I'm not ready to talk about yet). There's been plenty of creativity in all of them - sometimes too much, since with creativity comes risk and the possibility that it won't actually work as well as it did in your mind.

I want to hear more about this "fix unemployment" thing

I'd be more interested in ideas on how to fix employment - job dependency is a huge problem.

tbh, most programmers will probably be stuck with their JIRA issues.

>when I was just starting at Google

If you're working / have worked at the Big 5, your experience is vastly different than the rest of the profession toiling away at CRUD apps and web sites 9 to 5. Lucky doesn't begin to describe it.

Just like how some photographers focus solely on wedding shoots, or some treat photography as art. Or how some architects specialize in copy-and-paste homes, whilst others spend time engaging with and designing something specific to the client - I think there's a huge spectrum in terms of 'creativity' for all specializations that 'make' things, and it's hard to say that one is more creative than the other.

Perhaps whether or not you're exposed to creativity depends on where you, or the industry places you in the field.. perhaps the more experienced you are in an industry, the more opportunities you have for creativity?

> A programmer is given a very specific set of tasks (eg. send data from A to B, fix bug, implement X), and his problems are mostly technical.

That does not describe what I do as a programmer. I work with a lot of really smart people who respect my expertise and we discus the programming plan together. I am expected to come up with creative solutions to the problems we encounter and generally enjoy doing this. I code my own solutions and support the resulting software.

Frankly I'm sick of the whining from all the corporate drones who got into this field because they thought it would be a good way to make some stable money. If you sold out, if you didn't do it for the love of it, then you deserve what you got.

Setting the "cool kid angst" aside, most art forms and especially song composition is a rather repetitive task where you compose certain rigid templates (tunes and chords) into a passable song according to demands and structure of current society, make your record company listen, have them edit the song, repeatedly master it until they are satisfied. My point is, however boring and repetitive, you still have some room to think, tinker and choose just like composing.

That's the point. The main difference here is getting told what to do. Even a song writer can get told what to do. Write a song about politics, or injustice or love, write a screenplay of x talking to y about z, paint using x color with y shape communicating z values.

>Lack of creativity is actually one of my biggest complaints with this field.

That says more about the artist than the medium. :)

Constraints breed creativity!

That's only to a certain extent. You can imagine a set of all the pieces of art you can make and all the interesting pieces of art in that set. If they're are few interesting pieces, then the constraints do more harm than good. A good medium for expression will allow you to both express many ideas and restrict you from expressing the uninteresting ones.

To make this concrete, in programming, type checking eliminates all the programs which would have a type error so they are good constraints. But some languages constrain you in arbitrary way which hurts. For example, Java doesn't let you do any functional programming and has a weak type system, which means introduces design patterns.

Ian Bogost wrote a good piece on this called "Shit Crayons" comparing games like Spore to Photoshop, where even though Photoshop is more powerful, most of the stuff you can produce is bad, supporting the idea of constraints. But then he took apart Minecraft for being overly restrictive, causing many things like houses to be dull. http://bogost.com/writing/shit_crayons/

CRUD apps are probably not the most creative things, indeed. But I've had a fair bit of problems where I'd say solving them was a creative endeavour. Especially on the UX end there are lots of such problems in my experience.

I guess to more simply articulate it, there are levels of creativity. Being tasked with making something function correctly or making a UI look like a psd is more of a technical problem and involves way less creativity than creating something more open-ended like an original work of art. It's like designing a board game vs. being handed the designs and building it.

So it's exactly like art. Idea + implementation.

Disclaimer: Have been writing music for almost 20 years, programming about the same.

"I want a picture"

"I want a picture of a bridge"

"I want a picture of this bridge that I built"

"I want a picture of this bridge that I built, in these colors"

"I want a picture of this bridge that I built, in these colors, from this angle"

"I want a picture of this bridge that I built, in these colors, from this angle, in this scale, made on this canvas, with these materials, painted with oil"

Do you get my point? The creative decisions could be endless, even with restrictions. Sure, not all programming is creative, but that's true about any creative field. Most of it is creative though, or rather, it's as creative as you are.

Ok. Apparently you have the wrong concept of creativity, or you're looking through it with only one glass.

Creativity is not only doing aesthetics or poetry, the bare concept of creativity is unifying things that otherwise don't seem unifiable. Associate a dog with a circuit, that's creativity; innovation.

And boy, you have a lot in bare programming. There are many ways to write a code that does the same thing. Sure, not every code involves the level of creativity a painting can, but that's not to say programming doesn't have creativity whatsoever.

React, Redux, Sass, those all are great examples of programming creativity, just beginning by the problem they solve, it's creativity on his own...

Redux is an over complicated pile of rubbish.

I think coding is a craft, and like any craft, it can be used to make art, but it can also be used to less than artful ends.

Same with my profession: writing. I'm a professional writer. I get paid quite a lot for what I write, but what I write isn't art. I've just trained myself to produce a commodity that others find valuable. Obviously the craft of writing can be used to create art, but that's not what I do.

The craft of programming could be used to create great art, but that's not what most programmers do with it.

Most artists lack creative freedom because they're locked in to expectations from their previous work and feel pressed by dealers media, audience, etc. to continue in the same way. Meaning that they too face a lack of agency that kills their passion for their work and thereby also reduces its quality.

I think it's more similar to an architecture position. Lots of architects churning out copy -> paste work, but some offering really unique, inspiring and we'll thought designs.

except after a certain point it's not e.g. send data from A to B, it's send data from a to be with these C E and F constraints. Now take programmer G (you in the future or someone else) and make them able to understand it. Now you're thinking about design and architecture. Sure at a pretty abstract level. There's an art to it, admittedly with varying degrees of longevity and visibility.

The latter will be done with four chords ;)

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