<story><title>_why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius</title><url>http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/15/why-a-tale-of-a-post-modern-genius/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gdp</author><text>Articles about _why on HN seem to always take on a particularly sycophantic quality.  As a non-fan of Ruby, his contributions to programming outside of that community seem minimal.  The ethic that people appear to ascribe to him (&quot;programming as art&quot;) is precisely the opposite to that which I generally advocate (&quot;programming as science&quot;). I (and others) often suggest that the former approach is actually harmful to software quality in many cases, particularly within teams.&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally I think my objection is to elevating a slightly odd-ball programmer to messianic status based on a mildly creepy fandom that manifests primarily as people vastly over-stating the contributions of this one guy in HN comments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>antirez</author><text>Programming as science: not consistent with reality IMHO. My argument is that it&apos;s pretty simple to build a good computer scientist: take a guy with good IQ and put it into a good university. But there are zero guarantees that you&apos;ll end with a good &lt;i&gt;coder&lt;/i&gt; also, as coding is a matter of taste, tradeoffs, design decisions, creativity, ability to think out of the box, and so forth.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that most of our industry is not ready to accept this news. There was &lt;i&gt;no&lt;/i&gt; so important economic process like IT in the past where creativity and art had the same impact as it is happening with programming. Check the software and the sites you are enjoying every day: are they made by great scientists? The big majority are not.&lt;p&gt;But at the same time, the reverse is true. If you have good scientists you can create any complex program or system without problems. Look at all the PHDs at google, the result is a wonderful piece of technology, from the search engine itself to the cluster and other stuff they are running. But this is an engineering problem indeed, so it is a perfect fit for them.&lt;p&gt;But not everything is like that in our field. This is why for instance a big company like Google is not having a big impact in programming itself. If you see the reality most of their products for the masses are not working well, Ruby on Rails was not produced there, and so forth. It&apos;s not that I&apos;ve something against Google but it is the perfect example of &quot;company of scientists&quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>_why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius</title><url>http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/15/why-a-tale-of-a-post-modern-genius/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gdp</author><text>Articles about _why on HN seem to always take on a particularly sycophantic quality.  As a non-fan of Ruby, his contributions to programming outside of that community seem minimal.  The ethic that people appear to ascribe to him (&quot;programming as art&quot;) is precisely the opposite to that which I generally advocate (&quot;programming as science&quot;). I (and others) often suggest that the former approach is actually harmful to software quality in many cases, particularly within teams.&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally I think my objection is to elevating a slightly odd-ball programmer to messianic status based on a mildly creepy fandom that manifests primarily as people vastly over-stating the contributions of this one guy in HN comments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davidalln</author><text>I think dismissing &quot;programming as art&quot; as irrelevant and hurtful to the community is dangerous. Here we have the tools to create a near-infinite amount of almost everything that can run on a computer. We use code to run complicated robots that can drive a course without human input, solve the most complicated mathematic problems of today, and create artificial intelligence with the ability to learn as it ages. Yet at the same time, we use code to make short chiptune songs and fun small games hacked away in an hour or two.&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia defines art as &quot;the product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions&quot;, and science as &quot;the systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the world and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories.&quot; Why do these two things have to be mutually exclusive? Through creation and exploring, such as in _why&apos;s projects, we are further &quot;gathering knowledge&quot; about the limits computers can be used. And at the same time, we are creating art as these programs have had a clear impact on at least the Ruby community.&lt;p&gt;And, bringing up a more &quot;sciencey&quot; example, if the fact that my handheld calculator can solve complicated algebra and calculus equations in less than a second doesn&apos;t &quot;affect [your] senses or emotions&quot;, then you need a reality check on just how impressive technology has come in such a short time.&lt;p&gt;I personally believe that programming is one of the rawest forms of creation imaginable, and therefore must be of some artistic worth. Simply calling it science and moving on does a disservice to those who slaved for so many hours working on their piece of computer science history.</text></comment>