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Comment by Redoubts | Hacker News Reader

> Take joy in doing these things with precision and efficiency, and making your work easy to understand and explain to others.

If you think this is different than what the parent is describing then you’re doing it wrong

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"Code as art" implies a strictly different set of criteria than the ones I listed. If the Venn diagrams overlap a lot for you, that's great, but it's rare.

I think you have a very specific, and not widely shared, definition of “code as art.” Code as art does not mean code full of pointless Rube Goldberg mechanisms or following some esoteric golden ratio whatever. For me, “code as art” means code which is well-abstracted, readable, correct, concise, maintainable, extensible, well-documented, performant, etc — I.e. reflecting the things that matter to me as a developer. The process of getting to the point where the code has all of those things, or as many as possible, is indeed the “art” of coding. To assume that the result is some horrible morass of spaghetti that no coworker wants to read is a strange one for sure.

The thing I detest about discussions of code aesthetics is the idea that the quality metrics you speak of have such a direct relationship to the "product features" of the language, that we can simply know it's good by looking at it, and we are hapless simpletons unable to write this so-called "beautiful" or "clean" code if we do not have the feature available. That is all bullshit. Most of the features are shiny baubles for raccoons and magpies, I do NOT know what good code looks like(I can only state whether the coding style eliminates some class of errors), and what matters the most is the overall shape of the tooling.

Some languages have a big bag of tricks, other languages let you extend them to the moon, and still others make you work at it a little. In the end it's all just computation, and the tool choice can be reduced to a list of "must haves" and "cannots". If you need more expressive power -- make your build a little more complex and start generating code, give it a small notion of types or static invariants. It only has to generalize as much as your problem does, and that leads you to build the right abstraction instead of dumping an untried language feature on the problem in the hope that it is a solution.

Your definition of art is essentially synonymous with good or elegant, and therefore not really useful in this discussion.

What is your useful definition of art that is useful in this discussion?

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