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Comment by quonn | Hacker News Reader

This is a very strange thing to say since great art is often not technically difficult at all. Much of modern and contemporary art is like that, nevertheless the art is superb.

> Learning technical skills like draughtsmanship is harder than learning programming because you can't just log onto a free website and start getting instant & accurate feedback on your work.

Really? I sometimes wonder what people think programming really is. Not what you describe, obviously.

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I actually think a lot of modern and contemporary art is more technically difficult than it appears (though certainly not as technically difficult as making a marble sculpture or something). But fair point.

Not sure I fully understand your second point: are you implying that I don't really know what programming is?

I‘m not judging since I don’t know you. I see programming as the profession, grounded in CS and with coding being usually not the problem (instead designing the solution is the problem).

> Not sure I fully understand your second point: are you implying that I don't really know what programming is?

What search algorithms have you developed?

What non-trivial, non-Flask/Django/React, non-plugin/non-API tool, or library, or frameworks, have you written?

What actual percentage of your work output comprises computationally hard problems?

If we're talking programming, that's real programming, the kind you should be comparing 'hard' art to.

The majority of my career has been in back end web development so lots of work on APIs and related microservices. Judging by the tone of this comment I've probably never worked on anything that you'd consider computationally difficult. That being said, I've never sculpted something out of a block of marble or done a photorealistic painting or composed a symphony either. I'd say my technical skills are middling in both domains. I have, however, been paid for my code for the better part of a decade and I've produced decent enough work to be hired by major companies and consistently promoted. I've added useful features to platforms that many people on this forum probably use. Getting to this point in my career certainly wasn't trivial but it was much easier than getting to the point where I could produce any art that other people actually found compelling, and I still think I've only created one or two things in my life that were truly "good" art that meant something to anyone other than myself.

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