Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Good grief!! What a good book!

The comparison of the groovy, arty world with the grey, techie world was relevant in the '70s and I think remains relevant today. Not only do you get a book on the philosophical combination of the two, you get a stimulating story (mostly autobiographical, i believe) of an exceptional life, combined with a road-trip. The three are necessarily interwoven in a style which reflects the conclusions about Quality drawn in the book. Classic and romantic in unison.

So, why do computer people claim programming is an art? Programming is one of the most classically defined subjects on the planet, yet it's artisans claim an emotive compulsion. How?

Well, how should one sculpt an elephant? The unattributed answer (I wish I knew where it came from), is to take a large block of marble and remove all the bits that don't look like an elephant. Seems ridiculous, but there might be a nugget in here somewhere (possibly unintended). The artist works with the idea of an elephant and works the marble to achieve this idea (Emmanual Kant's a-priori elephant - there was a man who knew how to think complex thoughts). A programmer does similar. There exists the idea of a computing solution, and the programmer works the code to achieve this idea. An artisan in computing produces a beautiful expression of that idea and, much like a sculptor, a bad programmer will produce something that only vaguely resembles the idea.

But this only brushes the surface of computing. Beauty can exist in the HCI element of the program, in the code itself, in the aesoteric concepts pulled together to work in harmony. Yeah, computing is an art..