Programming is more engineering than art. People tend to naturally develop feelings toward whatever they work with for a prolonged period of time and that appl

Programming is more engineering than art. People tend to naturally develop feelings toward whatever they work with for a prolonged period of time and that applies to programming languages too. Mainstream languages for software development generally prioritize correctness, reliability, performance and other engineering concerns primarily, and then try to make the language ergonomic to the possible degree. In the meanwhile, those engineering judgements acquire aesthetic feelings. When someone says that a particular language's code snippet is beautiful, they almost always mean that the engineering effort that went into the language's design that made that particular captivating expression or statement possible is credit worthy. Its more like a way to appreciating the engineering effort and not treating it literally as "art". I would have agreed with the "art" part to a certain degree if at least a few mainstream programming languages are substantially more denotational in their semantics but unfortunately, almost all of them adhere to operational semantics mostly and that is basically "my" issue with treating programming as "art". Even when it is art, it can't be for software development(with imperative languages) in particular. So, to proof assistants, purely functional languages, Lisp dialects, there might be some "art" involved. And this is why the concept of "art" for programming is fundamentally fucked up. NVM.