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Comment by shotgan | Hacker News Reader

I don't see it. Programming CAN be used to generate art, but is not an art by itself.

I cannot imagine lines of code be exhibited in a museum. I can appreciate smart or witty solutions for a problem, but that is not what art is. I can appreciate a quick solution for a Rubik cube, I can even see the Rubik cube itself in a museum, but I cannot imagine the steps or instructions for that quick solution in a museum (unless that paper has historical significance).

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Here are a couple counter-points that come to mind:

Linus explaining taste in code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78Y17hAo96I

Fast inverse square root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

Being a humble rank-and-file programmer I did produce pieces of code that I will be proud forever as well, e.g. this snippet to control the length of $PWD in bash that I still use almost unchanged 25 years later:

    #   How many characters of the $PWD should be kept
    local pwdmaxlen=30
    #   Indicator that there has been directory truncation:
    #trunc_symbol="<"
    local trunc_symbol="..."
    if [ ${#PWD} -gt $pwdmaxlen ]
    then
    local pwdoffset=$(( ${#PWD} - $pwdmaxlen ))
     newPWD="${trunc_symbol}${PWD:$pwdoffset:$pwdmaxlen}"
    else
     newPWD=${PWD}
    fi

Not to rain on your fine snippet but you can use negative offsets to index from the end of the string:

  P="$PWD"
  [ ${#P} -gt $pwdmaxlen ] && P="$trunc_symbol${P: -$pwdmaxlen}"

Writing by itself isn’t art, but poetry and literature are. And, by the same token, I don’t expect most works of literature to be exhibited in a museum — books are easily copied, so there’s little value to just having the book’s text in a museum.

Works like the Black Perl[0] are decidedly artistic in nature. Demos (in the demo scene sense) are an artistic endeavour. Competitions like the Obfuscated C Contest or the Underhanded C Contest are very much judged on aesthetics.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl

There are different kind of arts. There is the art of a craftsmen and there is beautiful art. The former is rarely exhibited in museums unless is also has an historic value. It's the kind of excellence with that you do your work and it can be in fact in every kind of work you do.

> There are different kind of arts. There is the art of a craftsmen and there is beautiful art.

The art of a craftsman, otherwise known as 'craft'.

> I cannot imagine lines of code be exhibited in a museum.

Honestly, I can. The author of this article wrote Twisted. I certainly can imagine a museum where computer history is explained along with all the software achievements that made a huge impact on software engineering as a whole, and Twisted would have a place in it.

You don't have to imagine it

The printed Apollo program code is owned by a museum (https://airandspace.si.edu/) and is on display there sometimes

There may be others elsewhere too, but that one jumped to mind immediately

I agree, is the 100th rest api I’ve made for my 5th employer art? I don’t think so. It’s just a way to (maybe) make my employer money.

I’d say the brainfuck language on the other hand is art. Hard to draw a fine line as to which is which.

I can say most if not all the projects I’ve ever made land in the former. I’ve made some clever solutions but nothing approaching something with meaning.

There can be beauty in even the smallest of things. You can tell alot about a person by how they choose to structure even down to the loops and methods.

I believe it's a spectrum, just like there is a whole spectrum between the Mona Lisa and a generic flyer for your local bowling alley.

Is it not a problem of understanding and searching for complex problems to solve, and therefore understand?

If you've written 100 REST APIs, you're probably pretty familiar with them. But Brainfuck is completely alien and something you would have to work to understand. Maybe the distinction is in the effort required for understanding.

Regardless, I think meaning is something one has to self-impose. It does not exist naturally in the universe, so if you don't think it matters, it doesn't matter.

I agree that meaning is something one has to self-impose, but there is also meaning in the creation of art. I don’t find that same meaning in work that accomplishes the goal of making an employer money in the same way I’d incorporate meaning into a short story I’d write.

I think what I’m trying to say is that there are both ways to create art by coding and ways to just make a product for consumption. And I think using AI for said products doesn’t really reduce the meaning of said work.

I think I gave brainfuck as an example because it seems there was a meaning behind it beyond being profitable. The writer had something to say. Does writing something like brainfuck with AI take away its meaning? I’d personally say yes, but that’s an interpretation.

Neither poetry nor literature is displayed in a museum (or at least that's not their normal home). But no one argues that they aren't art.

You've never been to the Bodleian, have you?

I included the phrase “not their normal home” explicitly to cover cases like the Bodleian.

Unless you are arguing that the rare museum exhibition is the normal case whereas books and recitations are the abnormal ones.

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