We need both engineers and artists in programming

http://loudthinking.com/posts/42-we-need-both-engineers-and-artists-in-programming

by joao • 17 years ago

33 30 17 years ago

jleyank3• 17 years ago

I would change the phrasing - we need professionals in programming. People who approach their work with serious craftsmanship, own their work (both the good and the bad), and do the last 5% that distinguishes good stuff from the rest of the lot.

Do we always have time to do this? No. Is it always appropriate to do this? No. But when it is mission critical work, deliver the goods.

swombat4• 17 years ago

Perhaps it's because of the way you phrased it, but it appears to me that you completely missed the point of the article. It sounds like you're disagreeing with DHH but agreeing with Uncle Bob. Do you care to try rephrasing it again?

jleyank3• 17 years ago

No, I think even though it was early in the morning I said what I wanted to say. We need professionals, not amateurs, in the programming biz. Whether they're professional engineers, artists or whatever, we need people who approach the problem seriously, do the best work they can and make sure to finish the odds and ends that make good code. There's far too much "slap it together" code dragging down both the user's experience and our collective reputation.

One can be a professional artist as well as a professional engineer. I prefer the former generating visualizations and the latter doing operating systems. But I really want the #!~!&@$~! to work.

mlLK• 17 years ago

How are we exactly defining the term artist here? This term varies so much in scope that it can quickly become misleading.

If I try to conceive of an artistic programmer the first thing that comes to mind is not the language or the platform it's running on, but the result of the work. . .programming is just a means to an end like many of may already know.

It is projects like http://processingjs.org/ and video-games like http://tinyurl.com/sotc4ps2 that don't appear to solve anything in particular, but are merely an implementation of some [one's/one else's] artistic vision.

kiba• 17 years ago

Stop trying to compare it to engineering and fine art. Programming is a discipline that stand on its own and incorporate elements from other field.

davidw2• 17 years ago

People are still trying to figure out programming. It's been around as a profession for, what, 50 years or so? And has changed a lot since its inception. And has economics that are a lot different from something like building a bridge or even an airplane.

So it's natural that people are still attempting to define it in ways that make sense to them in terms of 'known' things.

_pius3• 17 years ago

Stop trying to compare it to engineering and fine art.

Could you elaborate on how programming is different from engineering? I feel like if programming seems that different from an engineering discipline, you're probably doing it wrong.

philwelch3• 17 years ago

Engineering is actually getting more like programming, with CAD and simulation testing taking the place of coding and testing. And some types of engineering (circuit design in VHDL/Verilog) is programming.

I've never engineered, but from what I've gathered, the main difference is that in engineering, you have to be really careful about writing down a design, because once you design a car or an airplane or even a shoe, it takes a lot of human effort to build the actual car/airplane/shoe, and you really want to make sure it won't crash before you test it. It's costly to reiterate a design before release, if that iteration involves a full design-manufacture-test cycle. Whereas in programming, we can build the actual program whenever we want (compilers are fast and cheap) so we usually start from an initial design that's completely broken and incrementally refine it. Even the largest scale programming, done right, has a "nightly build", the engineering equivalent of changing your airplane design in the afternoon, manufacturing it at night, having a test pilot fly it in the morning, and discovering that afternoon why the test pilot and your new airplane are now in hundreds of pieces spattered across the Nevada desert.

GeneralMaximus• 17 years ago

> People willing to trade the hard scientific measurements such as memory footprint and runtime speed for something so ephemeral as programmer happiness.

I'm sorry, but I just can't take this seriously. Runtime speed and memory footprint are not important anymore?

How will you justify to your customers why the software you just delivered takes several hours to perform simple operations? I'm sure they don't care about programmer happiness one single bit.

(I don't have anything against the guy who wrote this. I'm glad he found something he loves doing.)

davidw2• 17 years ago

No, what he's saying is that there is a tradeoff involved, and that for many things, it's better to optimize for programmer time/productivity, rather than for machine time. This has been true for 50 some odd years:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/12/04/the-economics-of-progr...

Clearly, that's not true in all cases, and some code has to be fast. However, it's often best to avoid premature optimization - write the code, explore the problem domain, and then speed up the bits that need it.

marcusbooster• 17 years ago

I think we've reached the point where it shouldn't take "several hours to perform simple operations" on any modern compiler/platform. Instead, it shouldn't take several hours of a programmers time to develop simple operations.

I'd agree with the conclusion of this post, "Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive": http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001198.html

PhilChristensen• 17 years ago

He's right about there being two kinds of programmers, and we might as well use 'engineer' vs. 'artist' even though it's not entirely accurate.

However, all programmers need to be professionals, at least if they have any intention of interacting with non-programmers.

pie• 17 years ago

The title here is a little misleading - it sounds to me like the term 'artists' is being used to describe professionals who are simply more laid-back and friendly than the traditional uptight, nose-to-the-grindstone ideal of a working stiff.

dxjones• 17 years ago

If you want someone "waxing lyrically about beautiful code and its sensibilities", get a poet-in-residence at your software company.

If you want art and engineering in programming, think of the way architects bring art to the world's most impressive buildings and bridges. It doesn't count if the bridge falls down.

Similarly, your program can't ignore "memory and runtime".

swombat4• 17 years ago

If you want art and engineering in programming, think of the way architects bring art to the world's most impressive buildings and bridges. It doesn't count if the bridge falls down.

Interestingly, the architects have structural engineers and all sorts of other engineering professionals to help them make sure the building, bridge or whatever will not fall down.

Perhaps that's the problem with software development. We still want the coolest fancy looking bridges that span miles, but we haven't quite figured out how to get the artist-programmers and the engineer-programmers working together.

aaronblohowiak• 17 years ago

"we haven't quite figured out how to get the artist-programmers and the engineer-programmers working together"

Pair programming.

Alternatively, I would say that we actually have. I believe that the Artist-programmer is most concerned with the expressiveness of the code, wheras the engineer-programmer is concerned with the efficiency and stability (of course there is overlap/cross-pollination.) The artist-programmers work at the problem domain level, and the engineer-programmers work at the systems/implementation level. Apache/MySQL/Sphinx written by engineer-programmers, Sinatra apps written by artist-programmers.

olefoo• 17 years ago

And yet as a profession Architecture seems to reward art more than engineering. The phenomenon of an award-winning building with a leaky roof is a cliché for good reason.

masomenos• 17 years ago

Interestingly, the work of many highly regarded "artistic" architects fails the basic test of keeping water from leaking on the inhabitants - Wright, Gehry, etc.

Maybe best not to look at contemporary architecture as a model.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

how can he suggest engineering and artistry are mutually exclusive..... some of the most beautiful code is engineered.

We need both engineers and artists in programming

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