New Blog: Programming Isn't Special
Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?
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@glyph I think the conclusion of the post, "Programming isn’t special. It’s just Art," probably sounds very weird to anyone who isn't (1) a programmer and (2) immersed in the discourse on AI. Probably most people would think that saying programming is art is in fact claiming that programming *is* special, and would complete "Programming isn't special. It's just" with something like "a job" or "a means to an end", and conclude from there that we should use AI to do the job more efficiently.
@glyph And I guess I've decided that I agree with that contrary position I just stated. For me, especially as someone working on accessibility, programming is primarily about solving more problems faster for people who have been waiting for solutions for decades, and yes, being reasonably compensated while doing so.
@matt I can certainly see this perspective, but I think a totalizing instrumental view of our activities is both unhealthy and unrealistic.
For example, programs are better without bugs in them. Why not write code without any bugs? Stop spending any time on readability and internal documentation, and instead repurpose all that time you saved exclusively to removing bugs.
After all, nobody cares about your internal docs, so why write them? But users care about bugs. So remove the bugs.
@matt I can certainly see this perspective, but I think a totalizing instrumental view of our activities is both unhealthy and unrealistic.
For example, programs are better without bugs in them. Why not write code without any bugs? Stop spending any time on readability and internal documentation, and instead repurpose all that time you saved exclusively to removing bugs.
After all, nobody cares about your internal docs, so why write them? But users care about bugs. So remove the bugs.
@glyph Because, and I say this as a programmer, programmers are the dumbest motherfuckers to ever walk this planet.
@the1jberg @glyph Putting on my slightly-more-serious hat: I don't really think that. I spent a lot of my childhood getting bullied and beaten up, and I think this sort of thing is a not-insignificant cause of the "nerd revanchism" it seems many of us later fell into.
(Me, I just got really sad and self-loathing.)
@datarama @the1jberg I fully agree. I occasionally joke about bullying or whatever but this is the same for me as idiomatically saying something like "I'd kill for a computer like that". I would not in fact murder anyone for a computer. Murder is quite unambiguously bad, and very much not worth it for a small price reduction in RAM. So's bullying. But it's important to pause and say that seriously every so often because some people tend to take these little rhetorical flourishes seriously
@glyph interesting
i usually expressed a position of "software can be art, but most of it is rather boring/practical and thus isn't", but if you look at even those boring ones from a position of introspection and personal development, then i guess that distinction doesn't really make sense and i should reevaluate that claim
(of course, whether or not constant personal growth or development is universally desirable is another question -- not everyone who knows how to play chess strives to be a grandmaster, not every painter wants to be the next picasso and, in this case, a programmer who already feels secure enough in their job/skills* might not be aiming for even higher)
* granted, that part sounds not as realistic in the current job market
@rnd one of the problems that this is gesturing at is that the art/not-art axis is actually independent of the good/bad axis, but everyone has this *really* strong intuition that "art" must necessarily mean "good", and is constantly trying to jam that idea in there. you can ask a lot of people "is there such a thing as bad art" and they will say "yes" without hesitation, and then turn around and, when asked "is this bad thing art" they'll say "no, it's bad"
@glyph my usual distinction between "art" and "not art" isn't that art has to be good, but rather that it has to involve unique creative decisions at some point (even if these are terrible decisions)
in terms of programming, that would normally imply that to have zero artistic merit, a program would need to be made entirely through copying snippets off stackoverflow or by reusing most basic implementations of known algorithms — to the point that that exact program would be almost every other developer's first guess as to how to make one
of course, in reality, such programs are non-existent — even if the software is explicitly written to match the look, functionality or interface of something else, the developer eventually needs to answer some optimization question or figure out a piece of implementation not obvious from the get go
@glyph i wonder if the difference in approach to generative AI between programmers and other artists also lies in the fact that programming doesn't (yet) have a "shameful" version of itself
as you mentioned, prose writers can compare themselves to journalists and copywriters, film and TV writers and directors do so against those who make advertisements and music videos (or porn), and so on -- and i'm not saying that the latter examples are inherently worse or less artistic, simply that they're not regarded as prestigiously
whereas for software, whether you're working on a popular OS or designing some boring internal-use-only website, it's still considered the same job -- and thus "upper-level" programmers don't feel like genAI is degrading their work to the level of "lower-level" ones, and the "lower-level" ones don't feel like it's blocking their way into the big leagues?
@glyph I think one thing that's been missing from the discussion so far, at least on this thread, is how self-absorbed we programmers sound to non-programmers when we talk about programming as art. I'm reminded of this thread a few months ago: https://caneandable.social/@JonathanMosen/116902703821009518
Yes, my own contribution to that thread was muddled, as I talked about a piece of software that I admired for its user-visible aesthetic qualities, not its code (which was and is closed-source).