People on my feed are talking about how programming is art again do I have to break out the Faulkner

Programming is *an* art because literally every human pursuit can be an art if done with enough skill and grace. However, programming cannot be appreciated *as* art, insofar as we are talking about programming in its pure form, and not married to other aesthetic pursuits like UX design, because programming occurs in a black box that no user will ever see.

The only people who could possibly appreciate the "art program" is another programmer with access to the source. And if you are writing programs that can only be appreciated by other programmers with access to the source, that's called being bad at programming. The user should *always* come first.

Programming IS engineering and it is possible to engineer with an eye to aesthetics but there is a difference between architecture and sculpture after all. People's lives depend on architecture.

(Again I am talking about programming in its pure form. UX design, video games obviously, etc. are artistic but not because of the programming aspect. Which is to say: to programs can be considered identical from a UX perspective if they achieve the same effect. So clearly the art is in the *design*, not in the *implementation*.)

If I walked up to a medical engineer and said "is what you're doing art" they would reply "no, what i'm doing saves lives." I don't understand y'all it's like you don't even understand the importance of your own work. It is *more* than just aesthetics that's the whole point.

Footnote: also no programs and proofs aren't like poems and programming languages aren't like real languages this is not hard to figure out it's obvious every time you get a segfault

Here's a programming poem:

START () {,
in{at, my, grace
!clothes?
DONE;
./

You will note that it is completely useless as a program.

The whole POINT of poetry is generating difference within an established form and you CANT DO THAT with programming because it DOESNT COMPILE

Language is plastic. Programming languages are not. Language describes things in the world. Programming languages cannot. It's exactly like maths, which I've heard called a "universal language" all my life but in all my years of study have never seen describe the beauty of a sunrise.

Anyway I wasn't trying to offend all my programmer friends or anything but when you start talking programming for "artistic" reasons it means you're diverting your attention away from other things, like usability, security, safety, efficiency, things you *should* be optimizing for, things that have real ethical consequences on users, and that worries me a little haha.

To the extent that art is even possible within the code itself it should be your last priority after… all the things programs NEED to be able to do, and if you find yourself using art it should be in service to one of those other things, and not for its own sake lol.

Once you make something into an "art" you pull the covers over any ethical considerations you might have, under the guise of "artistic freedom", and that's bad in a field like programming where the ethical considerations can be huge.

Of course pure art doesn't exist and every artist has ethical considerations with respect to their work. But the more detached and abstract we make the practice (the rhetorical function of calling something "art" is to abstract it away from pure practical concerns) the farther away and less significant those ethical concerns seem. That's scary when what you're doing is engineering things for other people to use.