Friday, January 25, 2013

Computer programming is an art?

Not again. Computer programming is not an art!

The output of a computer program may happen to be a piece of art. But the input to a computer which is a program SHOULD NOT be a piece of art! The input to a computer needs to be very discrete and should not be vague/subjective like an art. These programs may be very ugly to look at too! Computers are not humans and they don't mind if instructions to them look ugly to humans.

Moreover, computer Languages are not supposed to be art too! Programmers need to understand very accurately(not subjectively) what other programmers have written. It is not about art, it is all about clarity and unambiguity.

And I think these computer Languages should NOT be called "languages". They are not languages, they are simply abstracted instructions to the computer. Of course few of them realized that early direct instructions to the micro-processors are not going to fly in long run. So they started abstracting these low level instructions. But even after these revolutionary computer "languages" set in, they are not like the languages we humans use. And actually these "languages" should never be like regular human languages. Some computer scientist must have taken things easy and declared that these mechanical instructions are also language in a philosophical way.

We should never write poetry in computer "languages", they are not meant for that.

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