The whole art/science vein of these Knuth quotes seems like a
lot of BS, trying to situate computer programming in the
long-standing and overblown science/humanities "divide."
I should like to see an argument rather than mere assertion.
Steve Jobs is not an authority on this subject, but I found his
conception of placing Apple at the juncture of science and the
humanities rather intriguing.
He characterizes the artistic approach as "aesthetic, creative,
humanitarian, anxious, irrational."
He was making a statement about how it was characterized in his
time, in order to set the context for his further remarks. He
didn't express a view one way or another about whether this was a
good characterization.
But of course, there are aesthetic elements to any human
endeavor: the scientific camp simply favors different
aesthetics.Anything beyond the most rudimentary science
requires a great deal of imagination and creativity: it just
requires learning a great deal of technical concepts first that
may be harder to manipulate mentally.
Yes - so we agree about the most important part, because this has
implications for how one thinks about language design, programmer
productivity, quality, questions of measurement, and the like.
Of course art is "humanitarian," as it's subjective and aimed
at a human audience. Hard to argue the science that brought us
modern civilization isn't a hundred times more humanitarian,
far beyond the superficial sheen of "humanitarian" art he's
talking about. "Anxious" and "irrational" are human emotions
often possessed by artists, not qualities applied to art,
fitting given they cannot produce anything of the great value
of science.
Interesting perspective; I will leave it at that.
He is really arguing against the likely prevailing view of the
time of programming as a dry, functional process and pointing
out and pushing for the aesthetic qualities in programming,
which is all fine. But he then gets caught up in the false
dichotomy and claptrap of the science/humanities debate, a lot
of mumbo jumbo that is not worth getting caught up in.
He should have stuck to calling for more aesthetically pleasing
programming languages and tools- the best contribution he could
have made is to more precisely define what he thinks that
aesthetic should look like- instead of needlessly laying out
worthless and overly simplistic platonic definitions like the
mindsets of Art and Science. At least his piece gave us that
"premature optimization" line, which is worth far more than
everything around it.
That's rather the point - one cannot 'precisely define' what
aesthetic excellence looks like because it uses at a basic
cognitive level a different kind of mental process to that
deployed in Cartesian analysis. Analysis meaning breaking things
down into their constituent parts, and thinking in terms of
gestalts being the antithesis. (That's one of the fascinating
things about programming: non-programmers perceive it as mostly
about analysis, but that is not the case).
http://www.ttbook.org/book/transcript/transcript-iain-mcgilchrist-uncut
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDO0yXgpD2w
There is a great desire by programmers and many other
professions to see themselves as "artists." Well, there is art
in everything, but they're not, and they should be grateful
they aren't, or they wouldn't be paid anywhere near so well. ;)
There is more art in C and D than Java and C++. I don't think
that Knuth was playing a relative status game, but trying to
bring peoples' attention to a facet of reality that he believed
to be neglected yet important. I believe it remains neglected
and that the aesthetic element matters for good design, but we
blind ourselves to this if we pretend the field is drier than its
intrinsic nature truly is.
