An old essay that may yet be relevant today at a time when intellectual fashion has continued in the direction he was moved to address in his speech.

"there is a way to make a big improvement: it is still a pleasure to do routine jobs if we have beautiful things to work with. For example, a person will really enjoy wiping off the dining room table, day after day, if it is a beautifully designed table made from some fine quality hardwood."

"Language designers also have an obligation to provide languages that encourage good style, since we all know that style is strongly influenced by the language in which it is expressed. The present surge of interest in structured programming has revealed that none of our existing languages is really ideal for dealing with program and data structure"

http://www.paulgraham.com/knuth.html

CACM, December 1974

When Communications of the ACM began publication in 1959, the members of ACM'S Editorial Board made the following remark as they described the purposes of ACM'S periodicals [2]:
"If computer programming is to become an important part of computer research and development, a transition of programming from an art to a disciplined science must be effected."
Such a goal has been a continually recurring theme during the ensuing years; for example, we read in 1970 of the "first steps toward transforming the art of programming into a science" [26]. Meanwhile we have actually succeeded in making our discipline a science, and in a remarkably simple way: merely by deciding to call it "computer science."

Implicit in these remarks is the notion that there is something undesirable about an area of human activity that is classified as an "art"; it has to be a Science before it has any real stature. On the other hand, I have been working for more than 12 years on a series of books called "The Art of Computer Programming." People frequently ask me why I picked such a title; and in fact some people apparently don't believe that I really did so, since I've seen at least one bibliographic reference to some books called "The Act of Computer Programming."

In this talk I shall try to explain why I think "Art" is the appropriate word. I will discuss what it means for something to be an art, in contrast to being a science; I will try to examine whether arts are good things or bad things; and I will try to show that a proper viewpoint of the subject will help us all to improve the quality of what we are now doing.
...
As I was looking up these things about the meanings of "art," I found that authors have been calling for a transition from art to science for at least two centuries. For example, the preface to a textbook on mineralogy, written in 1784, said the following [17]: "Previous to the year 1780, mineralogy, though tolerably understood by many as an Art, could scarce be deemed a Science."

According to most dictionaries "science" means knowledge that has been logically arranged and systematized in the form of general "laws." The advantage of science is that it saves us from the need to think things through in each individual case; we can turn our thoughts to higher-level concepts. As John Ruskin wrote in 1853 [32]: "The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions."

It seems to me that if the authors I studied were writing today, they would agree with the following characterization: Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it. Since the notion of an algorithm or a computer program provides us with an extremely useful test for the depth of our knowledge about any given subject, the process of going from an art to a science means that we learn how to automate something.
...
From this standpoint it is certainly desirable to make computer programming a science, and we have indeed come a long way in the 15 years since the publication ot the remarks I quoted at the beginning of this talk. Fifteen years ago computer programming was so badly understood that hardly anyone even thought about proving programs correct; we just fiddled with a program until we "knew" it worked. At that time we didn't even know how to express the concept that a program was correct, in any rigorous way. It is only in recent years that we have been learning about the processes of abstraction by which programs are written and understood; and this new knowledge about programming is currently producing great payoffs in practice, even though few programs are actually proved correct with complete rigor, since we are beginning to understand the principles of program structure.
...
A scientific approach is generally characterized by the words logical, systematic, impersonal, calm, rational, while an artistic approach is characterized by the words aesthetic, creative, humanitarian, anxious, irrational. It seems to me that both of these apparently contradictory approaches have great value with respect to computer programming.
...
When I speak about computer programming as an art, I am thinking primarily of it as an art form, in an aesthetic sense. The chief goal of my work as educator and author is to help people learn how to write beautiful programs. It is for this reason I was especially pleased to learn recently [32] that my books actually appear in the Fine Arts Library at Cornell University. (However, the three volumes apparently sit there neatly on the shelf, without being used, so I'm afraid the librarians may have made a mistake by interpreting my title literally.)

My feeling is that when we prepare a program, it can be like composing poetry or music; as Andrei Ershov has said [9], programming can give us both intellectual and emotional satisfaction, because it is a real achievement to master complexity and to establish a system of consistent rules.

Furthermore when we read other people's programs, we can recognize some of them as genuine works of art. I can still remember the great thrill it was for me to read the listing of Stan Poley's SOAP II assembly program in 1958; you probably think I'm crazy, and styles have certainly changed greatly since then, but at the time it meant a great deal to me to see how elegant a system program could be, especially by comparison with the heavy-handed coding found in other listings I had been studying at the same time. The possibility of writing beautiful programs, even in assembly language, is what got me hooked on programming in the first place.

Some programs are elegant, some are exquisite, some are sparkling. My claim is that it is possible to write grand programs, noble programs, truly magnificent ones!
..
Another important aspect of program quality is the efficiency with which the computer's resources are actually being used. I am sorry to say that many people nowadays are condemning program efficiency, telling us that it is in bad taste. The reason for this is that we are now experiencing a reaction from the time when efficiency was the only reputable criterion of goodness, and programmers in the past have tended to be so preoccupied with efficiency that they have produced needlessly complicated code; the result of this unnecessary complexity has been that net efficiency has gone down, due to difficulties of debugging and maintenance.

The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.

We shouldn't be penny wise and pound foolish, nor should we always think of efficiency in terms of so many percent gained or lost in total running time or space. When we buy a car, many of us are almost oblivious to a difference of $50 or $100 in its price, while we might make a special trip to a particular store in order to buy a 50 cent item for only 25 cents. My point is that there is a time and place for efficiency; I have discussed its proper role in my paper on structured programming, which appears in the current issue of Computing Surveys [21].
...
One rather curious thing I've noticed about aesthetic satisfaction is that our pleasure is significantly enhanced when we accomplish something with limited tools. For example, the program of which I personally am most pleased and proud is a compiler I once wrote for a primitive minicomputer which had only 4096 words of memory, 16 bits per word. It makes a person feel like a real virtuoso to achieve something under such severe restrictions.
...
When we teach programming nowadays, it is a curious fact that we rarely capture the heart of a student for computer science until he has taken a course which allows "hands on" experience with a minicomputer. The use of our large-scale machines with their fancy operating systems and languages doesn't really seem to engender any love for programming, at least not at first.
...
How did they develop their skill? The best film makers through the years usually seem to have learned their art in comparatively primitive circumstances, often in other countries with a limited movie industry. And in recent years the most important things we have been learning about programming seem to have originated with people who did not have access to very large computers. The moral of this story, it seems to me, is that we should make use of the idea of limited resources in our own education. We can all benefit by doing occasional "toy" programs, when artificial restrictions are set up, so that we are forced to push our abilities to the limit. We shouldn't live in the lap of luxury all the time, since that tends to make us lethargic.
...
In a similar vein, we shouldn't shy away from "art for art's sake"; we shouldn't feel guilty about programs that are just for fun. I once got a great kick out of writing a one-statement ALGOL program that invoked an innerproduct procedure in such an unusual way that it calculated the mth prime number, instead of an innerproduct [19]. Some years ago the students at Stanford were excited about finding the shortest FORTRAN program which prints itself out, in the sense that the program's output is identical to its own source text.
...
Another characteristic of modern art is its emphasis on creativity. It seems that many artists these days couldn't care less about creating beautiful things; only the novelty of an idea is important. I'm not recommending that computer programming should be like modern art in this sense, but it does lead me to an observation that I think is important. Sometimes we are assigned to a programming task which is almost hopelessly dull, giving us no outlet whatsoever for any creativity; and at such times a person might well come to me and say, "So programming is beautiful? It's all very well for you to declaim that I should take pleasure in creating elegant and charming programs, but how am I supposed to make this mess into a work of art?"

Well, it's true, not all programming tasks are going to be fun. Consider the "trapped housewife," who has to clean off the same table every day: there's not room for creativity or artistry in every situation. But even in such cases, there is a way to make a big improvement: it is still a pleasure to do routine jobs if we have beautiful things to work with. For example, a person will really enjoy wiping off the dining room table, day after day, if it is a beautifully designed table made from some fine quality hardwood.
...
Therefore I want to address my closing remarks to the system programmers and the machine designers who produce the systems that the rest of us must work with. Please, give us tools that are a pleasure to use, especially for our routine assignments, instead of providing something we have to fight with. Please, give us tools that encourage us to write better programs, by enhancing our pleasure when we do so.

It's very hard for me to convince college freshmen that programming is beautiful, when the first thing I have to tell them is how to punch "slash slash JoB equals so-and-so." Even job control languages can be designed so that they are a pleasure to use, instead of being strictly functional.
...
 Some tasks are best done by machine, while others are best done by human insight; and a properly designed system will find the right balance. (I have been trying to avoid misdirected automation for many years, cf. [18].)
...
Language designers also have an obligation to provide languages that encourage good style, since we all know that style is strongly influenced by the language in which it is expressed. The present surge of interest in structured programming has revealed that none of our existing languages is really ideal for dealing with program and data structure, nor is it clear what an ideal language should be. Therefore I look forward to many careful experiments in language design during the next few years.
...
We have seen that computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. Therefore we can be glad that people who lecture at computer conferences speak about the state of the Art.
====
https://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/opinion-pieces/don-knuth-and-the-art-of-computer-programming-the-interview/

I think of a programming language as a tool to convert a programmer's mental images into precise operations that a machine can perform. The main idea is to match the user's intuition as well as possible. There are many kinds of users, and many kinds of application areas, so we need many kinds of languages.

...
I realise this is an enormous question, but what is the link between the design of a language and the design of software written with that language?
DK:
The software writers who have particular ways of thinking about algorithms need a language that matches their thoughts so that they can efficiently transform those thoughts into working code.

Different thought processes result in different structures.

Hmm... science exists only as long as we don't understand something, then it disappears and only knowledge remains. Looks like he talks about engineering, but calls it science.

On Friday, 27 March 2015 at 11:33:39 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> Hmm... science exists only as long as we don't understand something, then it disappears and only knowledge remains. Looks like he talks about engineering, but calls it science.

One dismisses Knuth discussing the topic for which he is rightfully exceptionally well known at one's peril.  He may be wrong, but one should agonize before being sure this is the case and read widely and carefully about the topic first.  Often in our society people resolve cognitive dissonance by dismissing the awkward perspective that causes such discomfort, when one would reach a fuller perspective by putting up with the discomfort for a while before attempting to reach intellectual closure.

I don't believe he is making the confusion you suggest.

On Saturday, 28 March 2015 at 01:09:44 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> On Friday, 27 March 2015 at 11:33:39 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>> Hmm... science exists only as long as we don't understand something, then it disappears and only knowledge remains. Looks like he talks about engineering, but calls it science.
>
> One dismisses Knuth discussing the topic for which he is rightfully exceptionally well known at one's peril.  He may be wrong, but one should agonize before being sure this is the case and read widely and carefully about the topic first.  Often in our society people resolve cognitive dissonance by dismissing the awkward perspective that causes such discomfort, when one would reach a fuller perspective by putting up with the discomfort for a while before attempting to reach intellectual closure.
>
> I don't believe he is making the confusion you suggest.

Without touching on what Kagamin said, one must also take care not to fall to argumentum ab auctoritate.

On Friday, 27 March 2015 at 06:31:40 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> In this talk I shall try to explain why I think "Art" is the appropriate word. I will discuss what it means for something to be an art, in contrast to being a science; I will try to examine whether arts are good things or bad things; and I will try to show that a proper viewpoint of the subject will help us all to improve the quality of what we are now doing.
> ...
> As I was looking up these things about the meanings of "art," I found that authors have been calling for a transition from art to science for at least two centuries. For example, the preface to a textbook on mineralogy, written in 1784, said the following [17]: "Previous to the year 1780, mineralogy, though tolerably understood by many as an Art, could scarce be deemed a Science."
>
> According to most dictionaries "science" means knowledge that has been logically arranged and systematized in the form of general "laws." The advantage of science is that it saves us from the need to think things through in each individual case; we can turn our thoughts to higher-level concepts. As John Ruskin wrote in 1853 [32]: "The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions."
>
> It seems to me that if the authors I studied were writing today, they would agree with the following characterization: Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it. Since the notion of an algorithm or a computer program provides us with an extremely useful test for the depth of our knowledge about any given subject, the process of going from an art to a science means that we learn how to automate something.
> ...
> From this standpoint it is certainly desirable to make computer programming a science, and we have indeed come a long way in the 15 years since the publication ot the remarks I quoted at the beginning of this talk. Fifteen years ago computer programming was so badly understood that hardly anyone even thought about proving programs correct; we just fiddled with a program until we "knew" it worked. At that time we didn't even know how to express the concept that a program was correct, in any rigorous way. It is only in recent years that we have been learning about the processes of abstraction by which programs are written and understood; and this new knowledge about programming is currently producing great payoffs in practice, even though few programs are actually proved correct with complete rigor, since we are beginning to understand the principles of program structure.
> ...
> A scientific approach is generally characterized by the words logical, systematic, impersonal, calm, rational, while an artistic approach is characterized by the words aesthetic, creative, humanitarian, anxious, irrational. It seems to me that both of these apparently contradictory approaches have great value with respect to computer programming.
> ...
> When I speak about computer programming as an art, I am thinking primarily of it as an art form, in an aesthetic sense. The chief goal of my work as educator and author is to help people learn how to write beautiful programs. It is for this reason I was especially pleased to learn recently [32] that my books actually appear in the Fine Arts Library at Cornell University. (However, the three volumes apparently sit there neatly on the shelf, without being used, so I'm afraid the librarians may have made a mistake by interpreting my title literally.)
>
> My feeling is that when we prepare a program, it can be like composing poetry or music; as Andrei Ershov has said [9], programming can give us both intellectual and emotional satisfaction, because it is a real achievement to master complexity and to establish a system of consistent rules.
>
> Furthermore when we read other people's programs, we can recognize some of them as genuine works of art. I can still remember the great thrill it was for me to read the listing of Stan Poley's SOAP II assembly program in 1958; you probably think I'm crazy, and styles have certainly changed greatly since then, but at the time it meant a great deal to me to see how elegant a system program could be, especially by comparison with the heavy-handed coding found in other listings I had been studying at the same time. The possibility of writing beautiful programs, even in assembly language, is what got me hooked on programming in the first place.
>
> Some programs are elegant, some are exquisite, some are sparkling. My claim is that it is possible to write grand programs, noble programs, truly magnificent ones!
> ..
> Another important aspect of program quality is the efficiency with which the computer's resources are actually being used. I am sorry to say that many people nowadays are condemning program efficiency, telling us that it is in bad taste. The reason for this is that we are now experiencing a reaction from the time when efficiency was the only reputable criterion of goodness, and programmers in the past have tended to be so preoccupied with efficiency that they have produced needlessly complicated code; the result of this unnecessary complexity has been that net efficiency has gone down, due to difficulties of debugging and maintenance.
>
> The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.
>
> We shouldn't be penny wise and pound foolish, nor should we always think of efficiency in terms of so many percent gained or lost in total running time or space. When we buy a car, many of us are almost oblivious to a difference of $50 or $100 in its price, while we might make a special trip to a particular store in order to buy a 50 cent item for only 25 cents. My point is that there is a time and place for efficiency; I have discussed its proper role in my paper on structured programming, which appears in the current issue of Computing Surveys [21].
> ...
> One rather curious thing I've noticed about aesthetic satisfaction is that our pleasure is significantly enhanced when we accomplish something with limited tools. For example, the program of which I personally am most pleased and proud is a compiler I once wrote for a primitive minicomputer which had only 4096 words of memory, 16 bits per word. It makes a person feel like a real virtuoso to achieve something under such severe restrictions.
> ...
> When we teach programming nowadays, it is a curious fact that we rarely capture the heart of a student for computer science until he has taken a course which allows "hands on" experience with a minicomputer. The use of our large-scale machines with their fancy operating systems and languages doesn't really seem to engender any love for programming, at least not at first.
> ...
> How did they develop their skill? The best film makers through the years usually seem to have learned their art in comparatively primitive circumstances, often in other countries with a limited movie industry. And in recent years the most important things we have been learning about programming seem to have originated with people who did not have access to very large computers. The moral of this story, it seems to me, is that we should make use of the idea of limited resources in our own education. We can all benefit by doing occasional "toy" programs, when artificial restrictions are set up, so that we are forced to push our abilities to the limit. We shouldn't live in the lap of luxury all the time, since that tends to make us lethargic.
> ...
> In a similar vein, we shouldn't shy away from "art for art's sake"; we shouldn't feel guilty about programs that are just for fun. I once got a great kick out of writing a one-statement ALGOL program that invoked an innerproduct procedure in such an unusual way that it calculated the mth prime number, instead of an innerproduct [19]. Some years ago the students at Stanford were excited about finding the shortest FORTRAN program which prints itself out, in the sense that the program's output is identical to its own source text.
> ...
> Another characteristic of modern art is its emphasis on creativity. It seems that many artists these days couldn't care less about creating beautiful things; only the novelty of an idea is important. I'm not recommending that computer programming should be like modern art in this sense, but it does lead me to an observation that I think is important. Sometimes we are assigned to a programming task which is almost hopelessly dull, giving us no outlet whatsoever for any creativity; and at such times a person might well come to me and say, "So programming is beautiful? It's all very well for you to declaim that I should take pleasure in creating elegant and charming programs, but how am I supposed to make this mess into a work of art?"
>
> Well, it's true, not all programming tasks are going to be fun. Consider the "trapped housewife," who has to clean off the same table every day: there's not room for creativity or artistry in every situation. But even in such cases, there is a way to make a big improvement: it is still a pleasure to do routine jobs if we have beautiful things to work with. For example, a person will really enjoy wiping off the dining room table, day after day, if it is a beautifully designed table made from some fine quality hardwood.
> ...
> Therefore I want to address my closing remarks to the system programmers and the machine designers who produce the systems that the rest of us must work with. Please, give us tools that are a pleasure to use, especially for our routine assignments, instead of providing something we have to fight with. Please, give us tools that encourage us to write better programs, by enhancing our pleasure when we do so.
>
> It's very hard for me to convince college freshmen that programming is beautiful, when the first thing I have to tell them is how to punch "slash slash JoB equals so-and-so." Even job control languages can be designed so that they are a pleasure to use, instead of being strictly functional.
> ...
>  Some tasks are best done by machine, while others are best done by human insight; and a properly designed system will find the right balance. (I have been trying to avoid misdirected automation for many years, cf. [18].)
> ...
> Language designers also have an obligation to provide languages that encourage good style, since we all know that style is strongly influenced by the language in which it is expressed. The present surge of interest in structured programming has revealed that none of our existing languages is really ideal for dealing with program and data structure, nor is it clear what an ideal language should be. Therefore I look forward to many careful experiments in language design during the next few years.
> ...
> We have seen that computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. Therefore we can be glad that people who lecture at computer conferences speak about the state of the Art.

The whole art/science vein of these Knuth quotes seems like a lot of BS, trying to situate computer programming in the long-standing and overblown science/humanities "divide."

He characterizes the artistic approach as "aesthetic, creative, humanitarian, anxious, irrational."  But of course, there are aesthetic elements to any human endeavor: the scientific camp simply favors different aesthetics.  Anything beyond the most rudimentary science requires a great deal of imagination and creativity: it just requires learning a great deal of technical concepts first that may be harder to manipulate mentally.

Of course art is "humanitarian," as it's subjective and aimed at a human audience.  Hard to argue the science that brought us modern civilization isn't a hundred times more humanitarian, far beyond the superficial sheen of "humanitarian" art he's talking about.  "Anxious" and "irrational" are human emotions often possessed by artists, not qualities applied to art, fitting given they cannot produce anything of the great value of science.

He is really arguing against the likely prevailing view of the time of programming as a dry, functional process and pointing out and pushing for the aesthetic qualities in programming, which is all fine.  But he then gets caught up in the false dichotomy and claptrap of the science/humanities debate, a lot of mumbo jumbo that is not worth getting caught up in.

He should have stuck to calling for more aesthetically pleasing programming languages and tools- the best contribution he could have made is to more precisely define what he thinks that aesthetic should look like- instead of needlessly laying out worthless and overly simplistic platonic definitions like the mindsets of Art and Science.  At least his piece gave us that "premature optimization" line, which is worth far more than everything around it.

There is a great desire by programmers and many other professions to see themselves as "artists."  Well, there is art in everything, but they're not, and they should be grateful they aren't, or they wouldn't be paid anywhere near so well. ;)

On Saturday, 28 March 2015 at 09:04:51 UTC, Messenger wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 March 2015 at 01:09:44 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>> On Friday, 27 March 2015 at 11:33:39 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>>> Hmm... science exists only as long as we don't understand something, then it disappears and only knowledge remains. Looks like he talks about engineering, but calls it science.
>>
>> One dismisses Knuth discussing the topic for which he is rightfully exceptionally well known at one's peril.  He may be wrong, but one should agonize before being sure this is the case and read widely and carefully about the topic first.  Often in our society people resolve cognitive dissonance by dismissing the awkward perspective that causes such discomfort, when one would reach a fuller perspective by putting up with the discomfort for a while before attempting to reach intellectual closure.
>>
>> I don't believe he is making the confusion you suggest.
>
> Without touching on what Kagamin said, one must also take care not to fall to argumentum ab auctoritate.

Argument from authority was not a fallacy in the time this began to be deployed.  After the European Dark Ages, there simply was not anyone alive of the ability, learning and discernment of the best minds of the past whose works had survived, and during the period of catching up (remember that as late as at the time Gibbon wrote classical achievements in urban infrastructure were way ahead of what we had in London - no sewers!)

This being said, I did not make anything tending towards an argument from authority.  I did suggest a man such as Knuth probably understood well the difference between engineering and science, and that in these sorts of cases where one is offended by reading something because it causes cognitive dissonance, one may benefit from suspending judgement temporarily and reading more by other authors resonant with the offending piece to try to make sense of the discomfort and either reject it on the basis of a now deeper understanding, or integrate some or part of it.  Irritation triggers the growth of pearls, if one lets it.

I appreciate that many of us have better things to do.  But I had been thinking about why I find D appealing, and how I would get this across to future partners, and had also been thinking about various forum comments equating measurement with science, and so I found this Knuth piece highly thought-provoking.

Because it goes against the grain of the prevailing tendency, I shouldn't expect many to agree.  But there is nothing wrong with appealing to minority opinion, provided one does not become a crank.  In a sense that is in any case part of how I make a living.

> The whole art/science vein of these Knuth quotes seems like a lot of BS, trying to situate computer programming in the long-standing and overblown science/humanities "divide."

I should like to see an argument rather than mere assertion.  Steve Jobs is not an authority on this subject, but I found his conception of placing Apple at the juncture of science and the humanities rather intriguing.

> He characterizes the artistic approach as "aesthetic, creative, humanitarian, anxious, irrational."

He was making a statement about how it was characterized in his time, in order to set the context for his further remarks.  He didn't express a view one way or another about whether this was a good characterization.

> But of course, there are aesthetic elements to any human endeavor: the scientific camp simply favors different aesthetics.Anything beyond the most rudimentary science requires a great deal of imagination and creativity: it just requires learning a great deal of technical concepts first that may be harder to manipulate mentally.

Yes - so we agree about the most important part, because this has implications for how one thinks about language design, programmer productivity, quality, questions of measurement, and the like.

> Of course art is "humanitarian," as it's subjective and aimed at a human audience.  Hard to argue the science that brought us modern civilization isn't a hundred times more humanitarian, far beyond the superficial sheen of "humanitarian" art he's talking about.  "Anxious" and "irrational" are human emotions often possessed by artists, not qualities applied to art, fitting given they cannot produce anything of the great value of science.

Interesting perspective; I will leave it at that.

> He is really arguing against the likely prevailing view of the time of programming as a dry, functional process and pointing out and pushing for the aesthetic qualities in programming, which is all fine.  But he then gets caught up in the false dichotomy and claptrap of the science/humanities debate, a lot of mumbo jumbo that is not worth getting caught up in.
>
> He should have stuck to calling for more aesthetically pleasing programming languages and tools- the best contribution he could have made is to more precisely define what he thinks that aesthetic should look like- instead of needlessly laying out worthless and overly simplistic platonic definitions like the mindsets of Art and Science.  At least his piece gave us that "premature optimization" line, which is worth far more than everything around it.

That's rather the point - one cannot 'precisely define' what aesthetic excellence looks like because it uses at a basic cognitive level a different kind of mental process to that deployed in Cartesian analysis.  Analysis meaning breaking things down into their constituent parts, and thinking in terms of gestalts being the antithesis.  (That's one of the fascinating things about programming: non-programmers perceive it as mostly about analysis, but that is not the case).

http://www.ttbook.org/book/transcript/transcript-iain-mcgilchrist-uncut
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDO0yXgpD2w

> There is a great desire by programmers and many other professions to see themselves as "artists."  Well, there is art in everything, but they're not, and they should be grateful they aren't, or they wouldn't be paid anywhere near so well. ;)

There is more art in C and D than Java and C++.  I don't think that Knuth was playing a relative status game, but trying to bring peoples' attention to a facet of reality that he believed to be neglected yet important.  I believe it remains neglected and that the aesthetic element matters for good design, but we blind ourselves to this if we pretend the field is drier than its intrinsic nature truly is.

On Sunday, 29 March 2015 at 18:05:28 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> I appreciate that many of us have better things to do.  But I had been thinking about why I find D appealing, and how I would get this across to future partners, and had also been thinking about various forum comments equating measurement with science, and so I found this Knuth piece highly thought-provoking.
>
> Because it goes against the grain of the prevailing tendency, I shouldn't expect many to agree.  But there is nothing wrong with appealing to minority opinion, provided one does not become a crank.  In a sense that is in any case part of how I make a living.

I completely agree with you about the aesthetic appeal of writing and reading D, it is one of the major draws of the language to me.  I've recently been dealing with some C code and it feels like going back to punch cards by comparison.  It is not a minor issue and Walter has often talked about optimizing for it.

The white-space formatting requirements of Python were one of the main reasons I rejected it early on.  Call it a superficial, knee-jerk reaction if you like, but I can't be bothered with a language that won't even let me insert temporary debugging code without formatting it just right.

On Sunday, 29 March 2015 at 18:51:19 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Sunday, 29 March 2015 at 18:05:28 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>> I appreciate that many of us have better things to do.  But I had been thinking about why I find D appealing, and how I would get this across to future partners, and had also been thinking about various forum comments equating measurement with science, and so I found this Knuth piece highly thought-provoking.
>>
>> Because it goes against the grain of the prevailing tendency, I shouldn't expect many to agree.  But there is nothing wrong with appealing to minority opinion, provided one does not become a crank.  In a sense that is in any case part of how I make a living.
>
> I completely agree with you about the aesthetic appeal of writing and reading D, it is one of the major draws of the language to me.  I've recently been dealing with some C code and it feels like going back to punch cards by comparison.  It is not a minor issue and Walter has often talked about optimizing for it.
>
> The white-space formatting requirements of Python were one of the main reasons I rejected it early on.  Call it a superficial, knee-jerk reaction if you like, but I can't be bothered with a language that won't even let me insert temporary debugging code without formatting it just right.

Beauty will save the world.

But it's not mere indulgence because an accurate image of reality is beautiful, and programming is a human activity and emotional and psychological considerations cannot be wished away.

I can put up with the white-space stuff, but the lack of compile-time checking disturbs me and it seems like one needs the scarce resource of discipline more to write good code there.  (I do not claim to be an expert on Python).

On Sunday, 29 March 2015 at 18:41:36 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>> The whole art/science vein of these Knuth quotes seems like a lot of BS, trying to situate computer programming in the long-standing and overblown science/humanities "divide."
>
> I should like to see an argument rather than mere assertion.

There is no point in diving into that worthless debate.  Whatever arguments I wanted to make are below.

> Steve Jobs is not an authority on this subject, but I found his conception of placing Apple at the juncture of science and the humanities rather intriguing.

Perhaps Jobs early study of fonts and typefaces eventually helped with the development of the striking visual design of the iPhone, iPad, OS X, iOS, and the various Apple products that are lusted after by conspicuous consumers everywhere today, but other than that, I always found that conception similarly fanciful.  Other than visual design, where is the great influence of the humanities on Apple?  Do they build great authoring tools, that the majority of writers use to write their books and ebooks?  No.  They acquired some nice editing tools like Final Cut Pro that had some uptake, but that's about it.

>> He characterizes the artistic approach as "aesthetic, creative, humanitarian, anxious, irrational."
>
> He was making a statement about how it was characterized in his time, in order to set the context for his further remarks.  He didn't express a view one way or another about whether this was a good characterization.

I pointed out that he was wading into an existing debate that was overly simplistic and that he shouldn't simply have accepted their terms.

>> Of course art is "humanitarian," as it's subjective and aimed at a human audience.  Hard to argue the science that brought us modern civilization isn't a hundred times more humanitarian, far beyond the superficial sheen of "humanitarian" art he's talking about.  "Anxious" and "irrational" are human emotions often possessed by artists, not qualities applied to art, fitting given they cannot produce anything of the great value of science.
>
> Interesting perspective; I will leave it at that.

Feel free to disagree. :) I find terms like "humanitarian" or "spiritual" to be so vague and loaded as to be meaningless.

>> He should have stuck to calling for more aesthetically pleasing programming languages and tools- the best contribution he could have made is to more precisely define what he thinks that aesthetic should look like- instead of needlessly laying out worthless and overly simplistic platonic definitions like the mindsets of Art and Science.  At least his piece gave us that "premature optimization" line, which is worth far more than everything around it.
>
> That's rather the point - one cannot 'precisely define' what aesthetic excellence looks like because it uses at a basic cognitive level a different kind of mental process to that deployed in Cartesian analysis.

I didn't ask for him to define "aesthetic excellence" but "what he thinks that aesthetic should look like."  It might be difficult to analyze or communicate, but if one cannot even describe what the output might look like, it is basically worthless to even talk about, as we can only happen upon it by chance. ;)

> Analysis meaning breaking things down into their constituent parts, and thinking in terms of gestalts being the antithesis.  (That's one of the fascinating things about programming: non-programmers perceive it as mostly about analysis, but that is not the case).

It _is_ mostly about analysis, but that doesn't mean it's all it's about.  Specifically, programming languages are a user interface, and so must be designed differently than some math library.

> http://www.ttbook.org/book/transcript/transcript-iain-mcgilchrist-uncut
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDO0yXgpD2w

I'll take a look at the transcript, the video seems too long.

>> There is a great desire by programmers and many other professions to see themselves as "artists."  Well, there is art in everything, but they're not, and they should be grateful they aren't, or they wouldn't be paid anywhere near so well. ;)
>
> There is more art in C and D than Java and C++.  I don't think that Knuth was playing a relative status game, but trying to bring peoples' attention to a facet of reality that he believed to be neglected yet important.  I believe it remains neglected and that the aesthetic element matters for good design, but we blind ourselves to this if we pretend the field is drier than its intrinsic nature truly is.

I think he was rightly pointing out the aesthetic element, but was likely playing a "relative status game" when he unnecessarily expanded it out to digressions on how programming is an art, not just a science.  Sure, all engineering is an "art" to some extent, but in a much more limited way than what artists deal with and most technical types honestly probably don't care much about the pure aesthetic appeal of what they're building, which is why he had to raise the objection in the first place.

I think the field has long since advanced past that with the use of languages from ruby to Haskell these days, though they're still slotted into certain small niches compared to the more "functional" languages like java or C++.  I don't see "slash slash JoB" in any language these days, so we've certainly advanced past that.