Is programming art? M.I.T.’s Jonathan Edwards explains
When you say “I seek to better understand the creative act of programming and to help liberate it from the primitive state of our art,” does that mean that you see programming as a form of creativity in the way that painting or writing music is? Yes, I do see programming as a deeply creative activity, but not really as an art form in the usual sense of the word. Programs do not express human feelings, so I don’t think it is right to call them art. Programmers do develop a certain aesthetic sense of what makes a well-designed program ‘beautiful’, but that is a very cold, mathematical sort of beauty. In fact I have argued that aesthetics can be a misleading guide for programmers.
How would you explain what makes code ‘beautiful’? The beauty of programming is intellectual. It is the pleasure we feel when a complex problem is suddenly revealed to be actually quite simple when seen from the right perspective. This thrill of insight is what motivates some people to become mathematicians or physicists. Our brains seem to reward us for successfully learning and solving things.
Programming is also about power. It is the struggle of the programmer to create order out of chaos. We are like little gods in our own pocket universes. We are limited only by our own imagination. Unfortunately our imagination is far more limited than we like to admit, which I claim is the tragic flaw of programming, though that is just my own opinion and not widely shared.
I tend to doubt that programming is art in the standard sense of the word. I don’t really understand most art, but it seems to occur at the intersection of ideas and emotions. Ideas are utterly dominant in programming, while the feelings are derivative and largely private to the programmer. Perhaps the closest we come to being artists is in the Open Source movement, where programmers contribute to building free software, benefiting only by the reputation they accrue with other members of their project. Open Source is in some ways a rebellion against the software ’establishment’ and is where many new things are happening. 
Jonathan Edwards’ blog
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