5 ms·

The Software Arts

51 points by Hooke 7y ago

booleandilemma 7y ago
Guy bills himself as a “software designer”. Not programmer, developer, or engineer. I wouldn’t be surprised if he can’t code his way out of a paper bag. Yet another leech in the software industry riding the wave and getting some of all this money that’s being passed around.
- zamfi 7y ago
  Dude’s a professor at Santa Cruz in the film department, not some “leech in the software industry”. Ex-Media Lab. Code on his site looks legit and his, I bet he’d pass fizzbuzz. I found this out in 15 seconds of Googling.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
danwills 7y ago
The demoscene (actual code art) isn't even mentioned in the article!? Makes it hard to take it seriously, and gives the whole thing a stuffy and academic kind of feeling. Has anyone read the book? ("The Software Arts" by Warren Sack) Maybe demoscene does get a mention in there? Seems unlikely when this is the main conclusion of the article: "software designers need to become fluent in social, political, and cultural theories and methods" I'm all for creativity in programming, truly, but this utterly fails to "overcome formality with creativity" (as 1995 by Kewlers & MFX urges)
debbiedowner 7y ago
I guess he called it the "software arts" after "liberal arts," which at Middlebury I once heard "prepares you for everything but trains you for nothing." It is a little interesting to think about software education that would train you for nothing, classes I've taken in CS and Eng do train you for some pretty specific things. I'd be interested in hearing the summary of some "university courses in, for example, political theory that explore how software platforms, like Facebook, should be redesigned". But this interview has tons of run on sentences that mix together concepts and everything bleeds together. For a moment I was shocked when I saw "computer scientists like Donald Knuth and Steve Jobs" until I realized it was two breathless sentences jammed together.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  Artists make art. Academics write papers about artists who make art. Some of those papers are interesting. Most of them are irrelevant to anyone who isn't also an academic. I would be surprised if that didn't apply here. There's a kind of stock liberal arts academic curriculum - a bit of feminism, a bit of Critical Theory, a bit of Marxism (but not much), stock mentions of Adorno, Horkheimer, Barthes, Baudrillard, maybe Kristeva and others - that passes for academic arts criticism these days. To an outsider, it's more of a cargo cult where you gain entry by rather robotically quoting from set texts and authorities and adopting certain standard rhetorical techniques, than a convincing philosophical movement. Given his comments, I would guess that he wants artists to learn some basic coding, and he also wants developers to have some familiarity with that kind of academic thinking. Well - no. I don't see anything useful on the table there. I'm hardly apolitical, but the reality is that some bedrock elements in politics are defined by the absolute worst elements in human nature, and by people who personify those elements - sometimes with plain old brutality, but sometimes also in sophisticated and complex ways. There is nothing in mainstream liberal arts academia that even acknowledges this, never mind offers a solution to it. So I have no faith that his idea of "political theory" is going to do much to make the next Facebook less likely, or the current Facebook (etc) less dominant and manipulative.
  - peter_l_downs 7y ago
    Quite an impressively large straw man you’ve built there.
noelwelsh 7y ago
I found the interview hard to follow, so I'll just focus on a few bits. I disagree with the idea that mathematics has limited computer science. I think the author has a belief that mathematics is a one-way street: you can use mathematics but you can't create it. This is not the case. He's correct the standard mathematics (say, undergraduate level engineering mathematics) doesn't model changes over time and other things that are interesting about computer systems, but this doesn't mean that new mathematics that does model these things cannot be created (and they have). It's also important to realise the practical limits of maths. Unless you're a pure mathematician you don't create maths for the hell of it---you create it to answer some question (what is the runtime of this code? Is it memory-safe?) Modelling everything is hard so you only model enough to answer the question of interest. I agree that there is an artistic aspect to programming, and I can think of two interesting applications to this. Firstly is to study programming as an art, and this is something the relatively new Programming journal and conference (see https://programming-journal.org/ https://programming-journal.org/) is trying to do. I think it's early days yet and we don't really have good vocabulary or processes for this study. The second is to use teaching techniques from art, such as studio learning, for programming. I think this could be really valuable and is very under-explored.
pards 7y ago
The review is written by the university that employs him, and the book was published by another university. This sounds like an echo chamber.
hyperpallium 7y ago
Unpopular opinion: mathematics is a liberal art. Consensus in the mathematical community is the test of acceptance, not formal verification. "Formal verification" rests on assumptions, of axioms and proof techniques, that it cannot verify.
env123 7y ago
If you want to name a "software artist", I would say Steven Wittens best fit the description https://acko.net/ https://acko.net/

51 points by Hooke 7y ago

Guy bills himself as a “software designer”. Not programmer, developer, or engineer. I wouldn’t be surprised if he can’t code his way out of a paper bag. Yet another leech in the software industry riding the wave and getting some of all this money that’s being passed around.

zamfi 7y ago
Dude’s a professor at Santa Cruz in the film department, not some “leech in the software industry”. Ex-Media Lab. Code on his site looks legit and his, I bet he’d pass fizzbuzz. I found this out in 15 seconds of Googling.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

danwills 7y ago

The demoscene (actual code art) isn't even mentioned in the article!? Makes it hard to take it seriously, and gives the whole thing a stuffy and academic kind of feeling. Has anyone read the book? ("The Software Arts" by Warren Sack) Maybe demoscene does get a mention in there? Seems unlikely when this is the main conclusion of the article: "software designers need to become fluent in social, political, and cultural theories and methods" I'm all for creativity in programming, truly, but this utterly fails to "overcome formality with creativity" (as 1995 by Kewlers & MFX urges)

debbiedowner 7y ago

I guess he called it the "software arts" after "liberal arts," which at Middlebury I once heard "prepares you for everything but trains you for nothing." It is a little interesting to think about software education that would train you for nothing, classes I've taken in CS and Eng do train you for some pretty specific things. I'd be interested in hearing the summary of some "university courses in, for example, political theory that explore how software platforms, like Facebook, should be redesigned". But this interview has tons of run on sentences that mix together concepts and everything bleeds together. For a moment I was shocked when I saw "computer scientists like Donald Knuth and Steve Jobs" until I realized it was two breathless sentences jammed together.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
Artists make art. Academics write papers about artists who make art. Some of those papers are interesting. Most of them are irrelevant to anyone who isn't also an academic. I would be surprised if that didn't apply here. There's a kind of stock liberal arts academic curriculum - a bit of feminism, a bit of Critical Theory, a bit of Marxism (but not much), stock mentions of Adorno, Horkheimer, Barthes, Baudrillard, maybe Kristeva and others - that passes for academic arts criticism these days. To an outsider, it's more of a cargo cult where you gain entry by rather robotically quoting from set texts and authorities and adopting certain standard rhetorical techniques, than a convincing philosophical movement. Given his comments, I would guess that he wants artists to learn some basic coding, and he also wants developers to have some familiarity with that kind of academic thinking. Well - no. I don't see anything useful on the table there. I'm hardly apolitical, but the reality is that some bedrock elements in politics are defined by the absolute worst elements in human nature, and by people who personify those elements - sometimes with plain old brutality, but sometimes also in sophisticated and complex ways. There is nothing in mainstream liberal arts academia that even acknowledges this, never mind offers a solution to it. So I have no faith that his idea of "political theory" is going to do much to make the next Facebook less likely, or the current Facebook (etc) less dominant and manipulative.
- peter_l_downs 7y ago
  Quite an impressively large straw man you’ve built there.

noelwelsh 7y ago

I found the interview hard to follow, so I'll just focus on a few bits. I disagree with the idea that mathematics has limited computer science. I think the author has a belief that mathematics is a one-way street: you can use mathematics but you can't create it. This is not the case. He's correct the standard mathematics (say, undergraduate level engineering mathematics) doesn't model changes over time and other things that are interesting about computer systems, but this doesn't mean that new mathematics that does model these things cannot be created (and they have). It's also important to realise the practical limits of maths. Unless you're a pure mathematician you don't create maths for the hell of it---you create it to answer some question (what is the runtime of this code? Is it memory-safe?) Modelling everything is hard so you only model enough to answer the question of interest. I agree that there is an artistic aspect to programming, and I can think of two interesting applications to this. Firstly is to study programming as an art, and this is something the relatively new Programming journal and conference (see https://programming-journal.org/ https://programming-journal.org/) is trying to do. I think it's early days yet and we don't really have good vocabulary or processes for this study. The second is to use teaching techniques from art, such as studio learning, for programming. I think this could be really valuable and is very under-explored.

pards 7y ago

The review is written by the university that employs him, and the book was published by another university. This sounds like an echo chamber.

hyperpallium 7y ago

Unpopular opinion: mathematics is a liberal art. Consensus in the mathematical community is the test of acceptance, not formal verification. "Formal verification" rests on assumptions, of axioms and proof techniques, that it cannot verify.

env123 7y ago

If you want to name a "software artist", I would say Steven Wittens best fit the description https://acko.net/ https://acko.net/