On Sunday, 29 March 2015 at 18:41:36 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
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.
There is no point in diving into that worthless debate. Whatever
arguments I wanted to make are below.
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.
Perhaps Jobs early study of fonts and typefaces eventually helped
with the development of the striking visual design of the iPhone,
iPad, OS X, iOS, and the various Apple products that are lusted
after by conspicuous consumers everywhere today, but other than
that, I always found that conception similarly fanciful. Other
than visual design, where is the great influence of the
humanities on Apple? Do they build great authoring tools, that
the majority of writers use to write their books and ebooks? No.
They acquired some nice editing tools like Final Cut Pro that
had some uptake, but that's about it.
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.
I pointed out that he was wading into an existing debate that was
overly simplistic and that he shouldn't simply have accepted
their terms.
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.
Feel free to disagree. :) I find terms like "humanitarian" or
"spiritual" to be so vague and loaded as to be meaningless.
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.
I didn't ask for him to define "aesthetic excellence" but "what
he thinks that aesthetic should look like." It might be
difficult to analyze or communicate, but if one cannot even
describe what the output might look like, it is basically
worthless to even talk about, as we can only happen upon it by
chance. ;)
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).
It _is_ mostly about analysis, but that doesn't mean it's all
it's about. Specifically, programming languages are a user
interface, and so must be designed differently than some math
library.
http://www.ttbook.org/book/transcript/transcript-iain-mcgilchrist-uncut
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDO0yXgpD2w
I'll take a look at the transcript, the video seems too long.
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.
I think he was rightly pointing out the aesthetic element, but
was likely playing a "relative status game" when he unnecessarily
expanded it out to digressions on how programming is an art, not
just a science. Sure, all engineering is an "art" to some
extent, but in a much more limited way than what artists deal
with and most technical types honestly probably don't care much
about the pure aesthetic appeal of what they're building, which
is why he had to raise the objection in the first place.
I think the field has long since advanced past that with the use
of languages from ruby to Haskell these days, though they're
still slotted into certain small niches compared to the more
"functional" languages like java or C++. I don't see "slash
slash JoB" in any language these days, so we've certainly
advanced past that.
