I completely agree. But I had to poke this with a stick: "Without exploring feeling, meaning, and imagination" (a) you don't need to drop practical exercises to

I completely agree. But I had to poke this with a stick: "Without exploring feeling, meaning, and imagination" (a) you don't need to drop practical exercises to add theory and (b) how does that compare to other types of "creating". I can't remember the last time I asked myself if I had enough "imagination" in my software code, yet it's true I expect that nearly everywhere else in anything I do. I wonder if this is part of the relative immaturity of software development. I mean, in math, sciences and design, all perhaps far from being "fine art," I can think of plenty of examples where imagination plays a role, if minor. But outside of design or UX, the closest code gets to imagination is perhaps UML, and that ... did not succeed very much. To counter my own argument, after thinking about it more, perhaps refactoring and TDD introduce a bit of imagination -- writing code that doesn't yet work, doesn't yet exist, or can be moulded into something else gradually, instead of treating a first draft as perfect. ... whatever. I've thought about this too long here. Moving on. Can you tell I had two artists as parents? And they both had degrees from the same university yet very different opinions on their art. I can't pretend to understand, I figure, without the background. But I like to consider whatever I'm doing to be in some small part, art. I don't think it's a crime to find math artistic, even. I happen to be in undergraduate Digital Media, half fine arts, half computer science courses. I'm thoroughly confused, these days, because it's untamed territory to combine the two in ways that give both an even shake. I've yet to fully embrace the fine arts side, particularly creating performance art, but maybe I've never taken it seriously yet. I've never liked how subjective its evaluations can be. Go figure, I've subjective evaluations at work all the time, and that's as procedural as it gets. Life is complicated, art reflects that.