• My own Robot Simulator entry for one of the contests on BadCode.rocks. I fulfilled the prompt of “the worst working implementation to the challenge that [I could] devise” and won an Honorable Mention.
• Along the same lines, the better-known FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition satirically uses a large framework to solve a simple problem.
• Quine Relay does something useless but complex in a way that was obviously hard to build.
• The winners of the Underhanded C Contest contain hard-to-find bugs that undermine the program’s purpose but look like accidents after they’re found.

More generally, Improv Everywhere’s 2009 Subway Art Gallery demonstrated to me that “art” is a perspective with which one can view any object, so I think it’s never wrong to call something “art”. But I find more artistic value in works that satisfy challenging contraints. The most common source of artistic value in programs is the way their code was optimized to be easily readable and maintainable by a human while still implementing the required behavior.

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The Dwarf Fortress codebase. It’s not open source, but at some point they didn’t even have it in version control [1]. That’s so wild to me. It’s art.

In terms of stuff where the source is available, for me that’s pretty much anything from the demo scene. This one for example: https://js1k.com/2012-love/demo/1100 - or https://frankforce.com/city-in-a-bottle-a-256-byte-raycasting-system/

[1] March 2013: “I don’t use version control – I didn’t like the feeling of having the code get committed into a black box thingy with no immediate upside” - March 2016: “I don’t even use version control. If you don’t know what that is then you’re not gonna yell at me. If you even know what version control is you’re gonna be like, ‘You don’t use version control? You don’t use source control? What is wrong with you? How can you even work? I’m just not cut out for it, in a sense. It’s been 15 years, so the reasons have change over time, but that’s my current understanding of it.” - March 2023: “I’ve got Discord channels to check and version control stuff to use now, so the process is definitely a little more involved”

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the large fraction of the work that is essentially throwaway research

Sketches? Noodling around on the guitar?

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It’s only art for fellow programmers. Nobody outside of this really cares.

I’d argue the same can be said of any creative discipline! A musician is using creative techniques and including musical references and callbacks that likely only other musicians (and music enthusiasts/critics) will be able to pick up on. A conceptual artist is creating their work within a longer conversation of other conceptual artwork—referencing prior techniques, critiquing past works and artists—that is mostly legible to artists, curators, historians, and critics with specialized knowledge of the field. (Maybe a parallel in programming would be seeing an I/O-bound Rust program rely exclusively on manual io_uring syscalls as a “critique” of async/await.)

In these cases, a layperson might only see the pragmatic function of these works (“this song sounds good” or “the art looks pretty”); but for someone with familiarity with a particular practice, the work can still be understood more profoundly. If anything, I’d argue that this makes programming even more like art in general, since just like in other creative disciplines, appreciating a work beyond a surface level requires understanding the history and practice of the discipline it’s a part of :^)

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additionally, commercial weatherproofing paint can be used to create art

i do think that if you use AI agents to write the code, the code itself is unlikely to be very artistic. but it can be used in the process of making art

you can even use it for creating code-as-art, though it’s probably best used for spinning up test harnesses or example uses or other things “around the shop”, rather than letting it hold the pen.

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I think the article touches on this fairly directly.

Berger reveals that the reality of this portrait is that a poor old painter needed some work, and some officials probably thought it might be nice to have an official portrait. So they paid some money to the poor old man, and he painted it, and then they had a painting. It’s a well-executed portrait of a group of people. Beautiful, even. But it was work commissioned for a fairly mundane purpose and it suited that purpose just fine. It was not, and is not, a divine relic.

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Paint can be used to create an artwork, but most paint in the world is used for weatherproofing and uncreative solid surfaces.

You say this like walls can’t be painted sloppily, and people don’t complain about that? Like you can’t apply the wrong kind of paint, or the right kind of paint wrongly. You say it as if house painters don’t hold themselves and other painters to some kind of standard?

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people are more likely to think their field is special and cannot be done justice by GenAI, but everything else they arent an expert on (ie lower ability to discern slop) is fair game

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I think part of the problem is that many developers don’t have much self-respect and have trouble valuing their own work, even though we tend to get compensated very well for that work - an interesting paradox!

It makes some sense though, as “the best code is no code”, and almost everyone has seen their hard work get unused or replaced by something else.

On top of that the general public tends to view coding as menial and rigid, something that requires no creativity.

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