So one more thing crossed my mind about implementing code with respect to art & science, and I had to express it…
I looked up the term “Art” in the dictionary. The first definition is:
- the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.
For me, regarding coding, it’s a matter of remembering a few points:
- implementation is expression
- significance is subjective
- beauty is in the eye of the beholder
So code can be expressed, fundamentally, in a bunch of ways:
- Electronically,
- Numerically,
- mnemonically,
- symbolically,
- graphically,
- gesturally,
- audibly,
- visually,
- etc… ?
Simple, clever, elegant, seemingly natural expressions of all kinds are typically beautiful to a programmer, when they function correctly.
Of course, to me, the most beautiful implementations are implementations that elegantly express its business in a way that’s very clear to anyone familiar with the problem domain at that abstraction level, and to the target platform(s).
See also:
politechnosis: Art & Science
