Programming Isn’t Special

Removing murals is actually anti-social behaviour. Art in shared spaces is good for the culture and community. Shame to hear where you play with your kids they would do something like this.

I don't think this really does much to refute the point of the article, though I think I read your comment (and its context) as an attempt to do so.

TFA gives the example of Deferred, the process of creating which the calls poetic and whose motivation he calls aesthetic. It also solves a problem - partly an aesthetic problem, but partly a practical problem. I think this is one example of the most common case for software, in which it both solves a practical problem and soothes the aesthetic sensibilities of the creator, the commissioner, or both.

TFA also gives the example of copywriting. Copywriting is writing, and novel-writing is writing; similarly, creating ORCA and Nebu required similar skills in both the macro and micro as each other, and similar skills at least in the macro as writing Excel, FL Studio, and Photoshop. That is, on all four quadrants of the code as art × code for art matrix (art code for making art, art code for doing practical things, utilitarian code for making art, utilitarian code for doing practical things), the same process and skills are employed.

The point is that, yes, code mostly exists to solve a problem, but exactly like writing or painting, the output of the same or similar processes is called "art" based entirely on cultural attitudes toward the output and its context.

Paint can be used to create an artwork, but most paint in the world is used for weatherproofing and uncreative solid surfaces.

You say this like walls can't be painted sloppily, and people don't complain about that? Like you can't apply the wrong kind of paint, or the right kind of paint wrongly. You say it as if house painters don't hold themselves and other painters to some kind of standard?

I think the article touches on this fairly directly.

Berger reveals that the reality of this portrait is that a poor old painter needed some work, and some officials probably thought it might be nice to have an official portrait. So they paid some money to the poor old man, and he painted it, and then they had a painting. It’s a well-executed portrait of a group of people. Beautiful, even. But it was work commissioned for a fairly mundane purpose and it suited that purpose just fine. It was not, and is not, a divine relic.

It's only art for fellow programmers. Nobody outside of this really cares.

I'd argue the same can be said of any creative discipline! A musician is using creative techniques and including musical references and callbacks that likely only other musicians (and music enthusiasts/critics) will be able to pick up on. A conceptual artist is creating their work within a longer conversation of other conceptual artwork—referencing prior techniques, critiquing past works and artists—that is mostly legible to artists, curators, historians, and critics with specialized knowledge of the field. (Maybe a parallel in programming would be seeing an I/O-bound Rust program rely exclusively on manual io_uring syscalls as a "critique" of async/await.)

In these cases, a layperson might only see the pragmatic function of these works ("this song sounds good" or "the art looks pretty"); but for someone with familiarity with a particular practice, the work can still be understood more profoundly. If anything, I'd argue that this makes programming even more like art in general, since just like in other creative disciplines, appreciating a work beyond a surface level requires understanding the history and practice of the discipline it's a part of :^)