Is writing Code like Art

Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash

Is writing code like Art?

hmm…

Can we say that being a Programmer, Software Developer or Software Engineer may be like being an Artist (Musician or Painter) ?

Does Code creation is like an act of Art creation ?

I don’t think so

It is a very close subject to me personally as i have been a Musician before i became a Software Developer/ Software Engineer

Well OK there are some similarities, but i don’t think we can say that writing code is like creating Art or code that works behind the scenes can bee seen as work of art

I don’t think that reading code can give you the same experience as listening to music or watching paintings

Why?

• A piece of art like painting or music may become more valuable over time. Software usually gets worst over time, it usually comes to a point that it will need to be replaced with a new code
• A work of art need to be finished at some point of time and usually the artists is not releasing it until he feels like it is nearly perfect
• I think we can say that about a lot of master works of Beethoven or Picasso that they are perfect and changing anything with them will be just change but definitely not improvement
• Whit software is different, there will be always something that can be improved and over time a new version of language or framework will be released and it is very likely that a change will be a improvement in that System
• Software development is done iteratively not until a developer feels that it is nearly perfect and he will not change it afterwards

So i don’t think that writing Code can be same as Composing Musing because the end result and lifecycle of the “product” is very much different

But

On the other hand there is one similarity. When a musician creates music then she\he is in specific flow like a creational flow. I think a lot of programmers know what is a flow or how it feels like to be in it

Passionate Artist and a passionate Developer can feel the same type of inspirational flow while creating something

Both Artists and Developers CREATES

Checkout my music channels:

Martin Kuzdowicz

Freeway Quintet

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Thanks for reading!