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 :^)
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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