Comment by Leonard_of_Q
15 hours ago
Nah. Programming is utilitarian, not artistic. While programmers can do their best to produce elegant, well-ordered and designed code they are producing a means to an end: the program has a purpose beyond being elegant, well-ordered and designed. If the clankers can produce programs which fulfil the same purpose and can do it reliably while taking less time and resources - a big if - they are the way to go for most programs. Cameras largely replaced painters for the purpose of producing portraits, photographers control the cameras to make them produce the desired outcome. Clankers will largely replace programmers for the purpose of producing code, we may need a new term to indicate the humans who control them.
I’ve always been dumbfounded by programmers who believed they were being paid by business to “write code”. Maybe get your head out of your asses and sit in a few meetings where the requirements are being generated from. You’d quickly realize no one has ever cared about “the code” that was always an inconvenient time and money wasting means to an end.
The bricklayer building my house may have the most incredibly aesthetic application or mortar during the process, but all I care about is the wall staying up.
Are they practising an art? Surely. Is it relevant? Nah.
You're not British, right?
The National Masonry Academy in the UK literally has a course on "fine art bricklaying".
Bricklaying is absolutely art, and the wall staying up for any period of time is actually a consequence of it.
I think coding is art; nothing I've ever done with coding is anywhere near as artistic as the Ouse Valley Viaduct.
People who think bricklaying cannot be art simply haven't been around enough old brick buildings.
Some bricklaying may be art. Not all bricklaying is art.
So who do you hire if all you'll see is a wall that is up? The one that seems to care whether it'll stay up after they're gone, or the one who's objective it is to get it up for the price you want to pay?
"You've got to make the back of the fence, that nobody will see, just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know, and that will show that you're dedicated to making something perfect." — Paul Jobs
The person you hire can be an artist of the highest degree, making the prettiest fence on the planet, caring about the project the entire time, and it could fall down in a brisk wind.
Half shaved alcoholic Barry could slap some bricks together with a cigarette hanging out his mouth and it’ll last a century.
Aesthetics and utility are not always as correlated as you might hope.
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