www.sixfingeredman.net
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what is art

Any definition of art based on what's "aesthetically pleasing" will be agreed upon by noone and fail to cover half the things most poeple agree are art anyways.

Here's why coding is an art: it can't (yet) be done well by a computer. That is, we don't know all the rules that go into making a good program, we haven't codified them. This is in contrast to most real engineering disciplines, where it is very easy to quantify a superior solution; the only trick is to find it.

What makes something art is how it is made, not what it is ultimately used for. As long as some part of writing -- and more importantly, appreciating -- good code remains locked in the coder's head it is as much a deep and mysterious art as writing a symphony or creating a painting.

"Or, to put it another way: the category of the process is not of neccessity related to the category of the product."

Ah, I did not confuse the two although you put it much more clearly than I did. My point can now be simply stated as: "art" is always a process and never a product.

I say that simply because I can think of no reasonable, universal way of defining "art" for a product. So while I agree that a painting and a computer program may not both be artistic products, to elucidate the difference will require more than a simple one-word categorization.