Code and Art

Is code art?

Is it close to art?

This is naturally determined by the age old question of what art is?

I guess in that sense, coding can be art, but it needn’t be.

Code is not literature
An essay or why code is not literature; a work of the art of language and prose but rather a foreign domain of organisms that we study.

But then it hit me. Code is not literature and we are not readers. Rather, interesting pieces of code are specimens and we are naturalists. So instead of trying to pick out a piece of code and reading it and then discussing it like a bunch of Comp Lit. grad students, I think a better model is for one of us to play the role of a 19th century naturalist returning from a trip to some exotic island to present to the local scientific society a discussion of the crazy beetles they found: “Look at the antenna on this monster! They look incredibly ungainly but the male of the species can use these to kill small frogs in whose carcass the females lay their eggs.”

Dabblers And Blowhards (Idle Words)
An essay on an essay by Pau Graham about what coders and painters have in common, this argues it is very litte, Graham thinks it’s a lot.