In the end can your antithesis exercise as many readers' imaginations and share as much insight as his book has?
What I got from your blog post is that there are better books for one interested in the similarities between art and computer science and that is helpful information but I own a copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach and it's certainly not a light read.
Maybe your right, "Hackers and Painters" doesn't belong in the same category as the other books you mentioned but then the authors of those books probably had different intentions for their material.
As for 1, Aaron Swartz sent us both this quote the first time you and I had this argument, and I'm surprised you've forgotten it. It's from Graham Larkin, curator of the National Gallery of Canada, whom he asked to adjudicate your claim:
""By even the most conservative standards (which your buddy seem to be applying), you'd need to go at least a few decades further, into the High Renaissance. Julius II's didn't even start commissioning Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's Vatican Stanze (School of Athens &c) didn't start until 1508. These works don't exactly represent a decline, except by Preraphealite standards which would judge them as over-sophisitcated and lacking in primitive simplicity.
(That's IT: your friend's a Preraphaelite! Well history is not on his or her side; such Victorian predilections are a mere blip in the history of Western aesthetics.)
The generation after the giant Raphael (and the giant Durer in the North) is a much better candidate for cultural and artistic decline--a story complicated by Michaelangelo's inconvenient longevity. Historians have often pointed to the 1527 Sack of Rome as a downturn in artistic ferment, or at least in the unparalleled ascendancy of Italy. I would add that Western painting of around 1500 can scarcely be separated from the other visual arts, including the still-young (to the West) technology of print, brought to incredible levels of sophistication by Durer and others in precisely the post-1500 decades. One wonders whether your friend meant "1500" or "like, 1500.""
I don't know who got the better half of the argument but I'm unprepared to respond to the curator of the National Gallery of Canada, enjoined to resolve an Internet message board argument, by suggesting that Maciej simply wrote copy that made sense to people who know nothing about art.
Again: I have no idea who's right or wrong in this "debate", but I find it fascinating, and I found Maciej's "essay" a joy to read. It was stylish, it was fun, it got me to buy that Minnaert book for my wife which earned me huge relationship points, and now I can at least tell you who Hals is.
"The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed."
I didn't say that nothing after was as good as the work of that period, just that nothing after was better.
I thought carefully about that sentence when I wrote it. If I'd meant to say that the fifteenth century represented a peak no one since had attained, I would have written that. I didn't because (a) it's probably not true, and (b) that wasn't the point I was trying to make. If you go back and read the part of the essay where I said this, the point I was making was that in some fields, some of the best work is done very early on; that instead of the slow buildup you might expect, people are so excited about the new possibilities that work in the field reaches "cruising altitude" almost immediately.
To refute what I actually wrote, someone would have to produce something made after 1500 that they were willing to claim was better than everything made between 1430 and 1500. Not just as good, but better. That's not what our curator is claiming, and I doubt you could find any art historian who would.
http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
But I figure I don't need the internet drama, and I already find amusing ways to exercise my philosophy degree.
Why don't you just say what you disagree with, no need to make internet drama or necessarily get pg to respond to you. I have studied quite a bit of philosophy and I like this essay a lot, so I would be interested in reading a good criticism (please, please do better than idlewords, it is clearly personal for him).
"If you exist, would you like fries with that?"
I'm sorry... I couldn't resist though :-)
* Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data.
* Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick.
It's funny, and maybe a little ironic, to look at this and see both a hacker's cynicism and a painter's habit of looking at things objectively.
Start with purpose. With the exception of art software projects (which I don't believe Graham has in mind here) all computer programs are designed to accomplish some kind of task.
I suppose this guy is a Java programmer?...
No one cares how pretty the code is if the program won't work.
...that or Perl.
Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do.
#%$hole...
PG could have alluded to the similarity between Math and hacking. The thing that I feel both share is that there is an underlying beauty to a well-crafted result. Truly beautiful results (like original self-printing program in Lisp) withstand the test of time, like a universal truth. Thus a program is not like an egg made by a chef, or even a Porsche made by an engineer.
The flip side is that there's no "way" to write a program. There actually isn't even really a notion of truth. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The only constraint I have as a programmer is to (1) not run out of memory and (2) not run out dough (which would force me to quit hacking and get a "real job"). There are some people who think that obfuscated C is art, and there's FP folks like me who would fire someone for writing anything in that godawful language (Which might be unfair. People should only be fired for writing Java on the job). I think this is pretty strong support in favor or programming as an art.
The other piece of evidence I cite is that the academic form of hacking is called Computer Science and we know what they say about anything that has the word "Science" in it...
Basically, the only premise of idleword's argument that holds up is that artists get laid and programmers don't. I will resist fighting fire with fire on this point.
But maybe PG should allude to poets or composers next time. Apparently some painters are real jerks.
Systems Analysis
and (unsurprisingly)
Programming.
Arguably the systems analysis bit was the more interesting of the two, it is the one that I would equate with architecture, and to some extent (but certainly not as much as some would) art.
The other part, the programming part is best equated to engineering and construction.
I find I go through exactly those two phases when making something new. The first part I love to do it's where all the interesting bits are, the problems get solved.
By the time I hit the second phase, the joyful part is over, from there it is just typing stuff in and realizing the vision that I already have in my head and debugging stuff.
Rarely (but it does happen occasionally) do I get back in the 'fun' bits while coding something. That would mean I've made some terrible oversight during the analysis phase.
The analysis phase sometimes also includes some programming, it is where you come up with nifty little programs to test your assumption and where you let your inspiration go wild in order to see if you can solve the problem in an interesting way.
That is the most joyful kind of programming that I know, it is on a white piece of paper without any kind of connection to the real world of data processing. This is were algorithms are born. I love doing that.
The rest is just plumbing and brickwork.
I've also found that almost all the interesting stuff is in the stuff upfront where I'm sketching out ideas on a notepad - roughly how things will work together, what the running time of different approaches will be and how it will scale, the user flow and interaction, and getting down the trickier algorithms to become reasonably sure that the main idea is feasible.
The rest really is just plumbing and brickwork. It seems like a lot is written online about the different ways to lay bricks, but I've never really felt that that was very interesting, except for resulting reductions in time spent bricklaying. Sometimes it's fun playing around to make extremely abstracted code, or some other challenge, but for the most part, it's pretty repetitive.
Thanks for expressing it, I didn't realize that the cool part used to be a distinct profession.
For some reason, the plumbing and brickwork in programming isn't viewed the same way by all people. Perhaps it's because of the use of low level languages (and by low level, I mean anything less abstract than Ruby, Lisp or Haskell. you can't meaningfully remove boilerplate in the C family of languages.). I personally find it gratifying to refactor code into something more elegant, and I'm sorry if you don't see it that way.
I had really been enjoying the good old city of Florence, but I now learned from Mr. Ruskin that this was a scandalous waste of charity. I should have gone about with an imprecation on my lips, I should have worn a face three yards long. I had taken great pleasure in certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio in the choir of that very church; but it appeared from one of the little books that these frescoes were as naught. I had much admired Santa Croce and had thought the Duomo a very noble affair; but I had now the most positive assurance I knew nothing about them. After a while, if it was only ill-humour that was needed for doing honour to the city of the Medici, I felt that I had risen to a proper level; only now it was Mr. Ruskin himself I had lost patience with, not the stupid Brunelleschi, not the vulgar Ghirlandaio. Indeed I lost patience altogether, and asked myself by what right this informal votary of form pretended to run riot through a poor charmed flaneur's quiet contemplations, his attachment to the noblest of pleasures, his enjoyment of the loveliest of cities. The little books seemed invidious and insane, and it was only when I remembered that I had been under no obligation to buy them that I checked myself in repenting of having done so.
