Craftsmen (craftfolk for the PCers) solve problems with beautiful pieces of functional design, but they do not engineer nor design (in the traditional sense) but rather do both.

Software development is its own thing, but for most people* it is much more craft than anything else.

* Designing certain types of systems requires a far more engineering approach (e.g. Google’s load balancing software, game engines), whilst others are more art than anything else (e.g. actual games).

I agree to disagree also.

Musicians in a jam session are under EXTREME constraints as to what they can and cannot do musically. Everything from the time and meter, the rhythm which keeps the various instruments in sync, the harmonic structures they play over, the melodic scales that are used are all inheritently mathematical structures which strictly confine what a musician can and cannot do. In fact the difference between music and noise, is exactly that fact that the members of a band are not all individually creating ’subjective works without any repercussions’. The whole ‘art’ of music is in the expression/communication of emotion with sound while being held constrained to a very strict guidelines…

That all being said, I dont believe software developers are artists so much as craftsmen.

The other book that comes to mind is Software Creativity 2.0

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance comes to mind as a book that applies to this topic. Quality is an attribute that goes beyond a sound design. Good Engineering will provide you with a sound design.

The Art in code happens when the *way* in which it works is elegant beyond that which a set of specs could determine.

Does your API adhere to the criteria in the spec sheet? Then it’s engineered well. Is your API designed in such a way that people using it can do some creative things with it — things which you haven’t imagined? Then it’s a work of art.

The confusion comes in that many programmers and scientists are doing math (no reason why they shouldnt), to support the science or programming they do. But this math is Never perfectly applied or conceived since this is humanly impossible – i.e. the code of the shuttle space craft still has +-4 known bugs in it – after 30 years of testing and fixing 40000 lines of code.

The biggest problem lies in the hardware itself.
which is based entirely on set theoretical mathematics (there are other branches of mathematics you know) – this implies that no physical situation can be perfectly modelled in a computer since the universe isn’t entirely set theoretic – (via basic topology and the violation of the distributive And operator on sets, by, for instance quantum mechanical phenomena).

It follows that computer programming can never be considered a closed practise in which all aspects to all problems are clearly and quantatively defined or definable. In my work as a computer scientist and programmer (yes Ive worked on many real systems) I’m repeatedly thrown against the age old dilemma of failure – a good system isnt defined by the richness of its functionality ,the quality of its code or the simplicity of its logic , its judged by the Grace of its failure – which is Art !

- How about http://hackday.org/ ?

“True pencil and paint artists can create subjective works without any repercussions.”

- Except starvation if nobody buys them, and it’s their sole income. Harking back to the days of artists having patrons. Surely painting over is the art version of redoing code sections.

Why does one library get chosen over another library, if both do the ’same thing’? JS libraries for example. Is implementation-style another version of “I don’t know art but I know what I like”?

I agree with the commenter about the Subway artists, though.

No, I would not want to be associated with being a lowly subjective developer. Likewise, I would not want to be typecast as a rigid objective scientist.

I explored this thought more in today’s post Why Linguists Are The True Code Artists…