Paint, Prose, and Python: Is Programming Art?
When most people think about art, their first thoughts usually consist of classic mediums such as painting, music, and writing. In modern times, the public consciousness around art has expanded to include digital mediums such as film and video games. I’d guess, however, that most people wouldn’t consider programming a form of art. They see it as a means to an end: a way to build systems and solve problems. Personally, I see things differently. To me, programming is as much a creative outlet as it is a practical tool.
As a kid, I’d spend hours building games using Scratch, a simple programming language that would let you piece together blocks of code like Legos. My magnum opus was a platformer where you’d fight various bosses, and I spent weeks getting every mechanic right. Something about being able to take an idea from my brain and watch it come to life has always been fascinating to me. That experience is what this site is about, and over the course of the semester I’ll be making the case that code deserves a place next to paint and prose.
You’ve probably passed through a dozen pieces of software before you even got to this post. Most people spend untold hours every day interacting with apps and websites, but almost nobody wonders about the people who wrote them, or the decisions they made along the way. Art is all around us, and the decisions the artists make are inseparable from the work. The same is true of programming, except that nobody ever sees the choices.
So what do these choices actually look like? I want to dig into the design decisions that I feel make up beautiful programs, why programmers call some code “elegant” and other code “ugly,” and the balance between writing code for form and for function. Whether any of that counts as art depends on where you draw the line, and that line has moved before. Photography took decades to be taken seriously, and people still argue over whether video games count. So ask yourself: what do you consider art, and how did those things earn their place?