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The Science of Painting and the Art of Programming
We tend to treat programming as a science or engineering. But is that all that it is?
A computer program is a recipe of steps to perform. Together these steps should solve a problem or perform a task. This seems very different from making a painting where there is seemingly no rule that has to be followed. What is a compile error on a painting?
Yet to the pedantic who gets too hung up on the concrete, it is hard to see any relation: Painting is an art and programming is an engineering discipline.
By now you may wonder why I am making the comparison between painting and programing. It is actually due to Paul Graham originally making that comparison in his essay Hackers and Painters.
This naturally spawned some rebuttals.
To me it doesn’t really matter what you compare it to. Paining is a bit arbitrary, but still useful as a way of talking about how both art forms and engineering contains aspects of each other.
Computer scientist Donald Knuth famously chose to call his epic work “The Art of Programming” rather than “The Science of Programming.”
