Re: OT; Donald Knuth on beauty, efficiency, and the programmer as artist
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.
Re: OT; Donald Knuth on beauty, efficiency, and the programmer as artist
On Saturday, 28 March 2015 at 09:04:51 UTC, Messenger wrote: On Saturday, 28 March 2015 at 01:09:44 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: On Friday, 27 March 2015 at 11:33:39 UTC, Kagamin wrote: Hmm... science exists only as long as we don't understand something, then it disappears and only knowledge remains. Looks like he talks about engineering, but calls it science. One dismisses Knuth discussing the topic for which he is rightfully exceptionally well known at one's peril. He may be wrong, but one should agonize before being sure this is the case and read widely and carefully about the topic first. Often in our society people resolve cognitive dissonance by dismissing the awkward perspective that causes such discomfort, when one would reach a fuller perspective by putting up with the discomfort for a while before attempting to reach intellectual closure. I don't believe he is making the confusion you suggest. Without touching on what Kagamin said, one must also take care not to fall to argumentum ab auctoritate. Argument from authority was not a fallacy in the time this began to be deployed. After the European Dark Ages, there simply was not anyone alive of the ability, learning and discernment of the best minds of the past whose works had survived, and during the period of catching up (remember that as late as at the time Gibbon wrote classical achievements in urban infrastructure were way ahead of what we had in London - no sewers!) This being said, I did not make anything tending towards an argument from authority. I did suggest a man such as Knuth probably understood well the difference between engineering and science, and that in these sorts of cases where one is offended by reading something because it causes cognitive dissonance, one may benefit from suspending judgement temporarily and reading more by other authors resonant with the offending piece to try to make sense of the discomfort and either reject it on the basis of a now deeper understanding, or integrate some or part of it. Irritation triggers the growth of pearls, if one lets it. I appreciate that many of us have better things to do. But I had been thinking about why I find D appealing, and how I would get this across to future partners, and had also been thinking about various forum comments equating measurement with science, and so I found this Knuth piece highly thought-provoking. Because it goes against the grain of the prevailing tendency, I shouldn't expect many to agree. But there is nothing wrong with appealing to minority opinion, provided one does not become a crank. In a sense that is in any case part of how I make a living.
Re: OT; Donald Knuth on beauty, efficiency, and the programmer as artist
On Sunday, 29 March 2015 at 18:05:28 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: I appreciate that many of us have better things to do. But I had been thinking about why I find D appealing, and how I would get this across to future partners, and had also been thinking about various forum comments equating measurement with science, and so I found this Knuth piece highly thought-provoking. Because it goes against the grain of the prevailing tendency, I shouldn't expect many to agree. But there is nothing wrong with appealing to minority opinion, provided one does not become a crank. In a sense that is in any case part of how I make a living. I completely agree with you about the aesthetic appeal of writing and reading D, it is one of the major draws of the language to me. I've recently been dealing with some C code and it feels like going back to punch cards by comparison. It is not a minor issue and Walter has often talked about optimizing for it. The white-space formatting requirements of Python were one of the main reasons I rejected it early on. Call it a superficial, knee-jerk reaction if you like, but I can't be bothered with a language that won't even let me insert temporary debugging code without formatting it just right.
Re: OT; Donald Knuth on beauty, efficiency, and the programmer as artist
On Friday, 27 March 2015 at 06:31:40 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: In this talk I shall try to explain why I think Art is the appropriate word. I will discuss what it means for something to be an art, in contrast to being a science; I will try to examine whether arts are good things or bad things; and I will try to show that a proper viewpoint of the subject will help us all to improve the quality of what we are now doing. ... As I was looking up these things about the meanings of art, I found that authors have been calling for a transition from art to science for at least two centuries. For example, the preface to a textbook on mineralogy, written in 1784, said the following [17]: Previous to the year 1780, mineralogy, though tolerably understood by many as an Art, could scarce be deemed a Science. According to most dictionaries science means knowledge that has been logically arranged and systematized in the form of general laws. The advantage of science is that it saves us from the need to think things through in each individual case; we can turn our thoughts to higher-level concepts. As John Ruskin wrote in 1853 [32]: The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions. It seems to me that if the authors I studied were writing today, they would agree with the following characterization: Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it. Since the notion of an algorithm or a computer program provides us with an extremely useful test for the depth of our knowledge about any given subject, the process of going from an art to a science means that we learn how to automate something. ... From this standpoint it is certainly desirable to make computer programming a science, and we have indeed come a long way in the 15 years since the publication ot the remarks I quoted at the beginning of this talk. Fifteen years ago computer programming was so badly understood that hardly anyone even thought about proving programs correct; we just fiddled with a program until we knew it worked. At that time we didn't even know how to express the concept that a program was correct, in any rigorous way. It is only in recent years that we have been learning about the processes of abstraction by which programs are written and understood; and this new knowledge about programming is currently producing great payoffs in practice, even though few programs are actually proved correct with complete rigor, since we are beginning to understand the principles of program structure. ... A scientific approach is generally characterized by the words logical, systematic, impersonal, calm, rational, while an artistic approach is characterized by the words aesthetic, creative, humanitarian, anxious, irrational. It seems to me that both of these apparently contradictory approaches have great value with respect to computer programming. ... When I speak about computer programming as an art, I am thinking primarily of it as an art form, in an aesthetic sense. The chief goal of my work as educator and author is to help people learn how to write beautiful programs. It is for this reason I was especially pleased to learn recently [32] that my books actually appear in the Fine Arts Library at Cornell University. (However, the three volumes apparently sit there neatly on the shelf, without being used, so I'm afraid the librarians may have made a mistake by interpreting my title literally.) My feeling is that when we prepare a program, it can be like composing poetry or music; as Andrei Ershov has said [9], programming can give us both intellectual and emotional satisfaction, because it is a real achievement to master complexity and to establish a system of consistent rules. Furthermore when we read other people's programs, we can recognize some of them as genuine works of art. I can still remember the great thrill it was for me to read the listing of Stan Poley's SOAP II assembly program in 1958; you probably think I'm crazy, and styles have certainly changed greatly since then, but at the time it meant a great deal to me to see how elegant a system program could be, especially by comparison with the heavy-handed coding found in other listings I had been studying at the same time. The possibility of writing beautiful programs, even in assembly language, is what got me hooked on programming in the first place. Some programs are elegant, some are exquisite, some are sparkling. My claim is that it is possible to write grand programs, noble programs, truly magnificent ones! .. Another important aspect of program quality is the efficiency with which the computer's resources are actually being used. I am sorry to say that many people nowadays are condemning program efficiency, telling us that it is in bad taste. The reason for
Re: OT; Donald Knuth on beauty, efficiency, and the programmer as artist
On Sunday, 29 March 2015 at 18:51:19 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Sunday, 29 March 2015 at 18:05:28 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: I appreciate that many of us have better things to do. But I had been thinking about why I find D appealing, and how I would get this across to future partners, and had also been thinking about various forum comments equating measurement with science, and so I found this Knuth piece highly thought-provoking. Because it goes against the grain of the prevailing tendency, I shouldn't expect many to agree. But there is nothing wrong with appealing to minority opinion, provided one does not become a crank. In a sense that is in any case part of how I make a living. I completely agree with you about the aesthetic appeal of writing and reading D, it is one of the major draws of the language to me. I've recently been dealing with some C code and it feels like going back to punch cards by comparison. It is not a minor issue and Walter has often talked about optimizing for it. The white-space formatting requirements of Python were one of the main reasons I rejected it early on. Call it a superficial, knee-jerk reaction if you like, but I can't be bothered with a language that won't even let me insert temporary debugging code without formatting it just right. Beauty will save the world. But it's not mere indulgence because an accurate image of reality is beautiful, and programming is a human activity and emotional and psychological considerations cannot be wished away. I can put up with the white-space stuff, but the lack of compile-time checking disturbs me and it seems like one needs the scarce resource of discipline more to write good code there. (I do not claim to be an expert on Python).
Re: OT; Donald Knuth on beauty, efficiency, and the programmer as artist
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
Re: OT; Donald Knuth on beauty, efficiency, and the programmer as artist
On Saturday, 28 March 2015 at 01:09:44 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: On Friday, 27 March 2015 at 11:33:39 UTC, Kagamin wrote: Hmm... science exists only as long as we don't understand something, then it disappears and only knowledge remains. Looks like he talks about engineering, but calls it science. One dismisses Knuth discussing the topic for which he is rightfully exceptionally well known at one's peril. He may be wrong, but one should agonize before being sure this is the case and read widely and carefully about the topic first. Often in our society people resolve cognitive dissonance by dismissing the awkward perspective that causes such discomfort, when one would reach a fuller perspective by putting up with the discomfort for a while before attempting to reach intellectual closure. I don't believe he is making the confusion you suggest. Without touching on what Kagamin said, one must also take care not to fall to argumentum ab auctoritate.
Re: OT; Donald Knuth on beauty, efficiency, and the programmer as artist
Hmm... science exists only as long as we don't understand something, then it disappears and only knowledge remains. Looks like he talks about engineering, but calls it science.
Re: OT; Donald Knuth on beauty, efficiency, and the programmer as artist
On Friday, 27 March 2015 at 11:33:39 UTC, Kagamin wrote: Hmm... science exists only as long as we don't understand something, then it disappears and only knowledge remains. Looks like he talks about engineering, but calls it science. One dismisses Knuth discussing the topic for which he is rightfully exceptionally well known at one's peril. He may be wrong, but one should agonize before being sure this is the case and read widely and carefully about the topic first. Often in our society people resolve cognitive dissonance by dismissing the awkward perspective that causes such discomfort, when one would reach a fuller perspective by putting up with the discomfort for a while before attempting to reach intellectual closure. I don't believe he is making the confusion you suggest.
