Comment by foltik

It feels like everything has endless fractal depth to it, and art is what we call it the act of compressing that down to something simple.

But you need some understanding of the underlying complexity to appreciate compression. We’ve all seen and tasted stuff, so a beautiful painting or a great pizza are easy to recognize.

Programming is tricky because the complexity is hidden. To laypeople it’s confusing, “why is this simple feature so complicated??” Even to other programmers it’s often non obvious. Someone could have spent days factoring the solution to a difficult problem down from 1000s to 10s of LoC, but unless you've also wrestled with that particular problem, it just looks like simple code anyone could have written. But really that’s the beauty of it. Programming is a massive space to explore that’s hard to fully comprehend.