Is Programming an Art?

First lets back out from twenty centuries of prejudice that work, especially manual labour, is demeaning. Making things is good: who owns anything he has not made? The great painters of the Renaissance wanted to be considered gentlemen, so they persuaded the world that they made not pictures but ideal forms. Later the Romantics, revolting against the rationalism that neo-Platonism had wrought and the machine factored, made a cult of the individual free spirit, the unique object, the onlie begetter. But this is a new age: a new physics of matter, a new kind of making things: of pure thought stuff .

Programming is an Art; that is, it is a techne, a skill that has to be learnt and practiced. It is an Art because it has Masters, acclaimed by their peers by more demanding criteria that the mere utility of what is wrought. They live to code not code to live. It is an Art as Music is an art, with rules of composition. It has an affinity to Mathematics yet creating more than numbers. It is an Art as Poetry is an Art, using language to build imaginary worlds and a Dream of Reason. Programming is an Art that builds as Architecture; castles in the mind upon the principles of Commodity, Firmness, and Delight. It is an Art that has its Patrons. It is an Art, like all arts, in which the best is but rarely achieved and only an impossible perfection could satisfy the Artist. It is an Art that, some hundreds of years hence, will have its Great Works and Canon admired and imitated, studied and appreciated. It will have Critics and form Heroes.

Above all because, paradoxically in a world of automation and machine made things, Programming is a craft that cannot be reduced to a factory process. A Craft where, because the Artisan works within the machine, no automation, no alienation, can interpose between the Artist and his Creation. It is a source of endless fascination because whatever becomes repetitive or mechanical can itself be made code and thus we move on to the next meta-level. So the idea that "no computer will ever compose a sonnet" is indeed true and so, paradox complete; Code is Poetry and no Machine can write that.