OT: Crazy Programming

[Paul Boddie]

"David LeBlanc" <whisper at oz.net> wrote in message news:<mailman.1021921632.6771.python-list at python.org>...
>
> Another artist - Yoki Ono - has a piece that consists
> of a video tape of people cutting her clothes off of her; so called
> "performance art". If the people doing the cutting had worn jack boots and
> swastikas, we would have called it inhumane and criminal yet somehow the
> critics call it art.

This reminds me of a documentary about Andy Warhol that was shown on
Swedish television the other week. With all the performance art,
bizarre clothing, complex relationships, experimentation, and so on,
one almost expected Austin Powers to make an appearance. ;-)

> Art is what you like, not what other people tell you you should like.

"I may not know art, but I know what I like!" :-)

Seriously, and more related to the forum, I feel that the cited
artistic nature of code is typically used as a cover for an activity
which would not withstand objective analysis. What is it that makes
code good? This is surely where we drift away from "art" (whatever it
is) and towards "design" and "engineering", along with the various
objective criteria which assess the success of such activities.

"Here's some code which does some neat trick - you can barely read it!
It's art!" says the experienced Perl hacker.

Our response to this (if we really care, of course) should be to
consider the purposes of the software: the code must perform some
task, other people may need to maintain such code, the code may be an
educational vehicle. Some of these purposes can be measured according
to objective criteria, and we might respond as follows:

"The code is obscure, thus making it a needless academic exercise to
learn from and maintain. However, this solution is marginally faster
and less resource intensive than more maintainable solutions."

In my opinion, art only comes into it if we discard many of the more
common objectives of writing software, and that was probably the
intention of the original Perl-oriented magazine/journal article.

Paul