from Hacker News

Great Software Entrepreneurs Are Artists

by vonical on 8/22/13, 12:44 PM with 12 comments

• by my3681 on 8/22/13, 1:26 PM

  Great software entrepreneur MAY be artists, but it isn't a necessity. Just because you craft or make something doesn't inherently make you an artist. Are the people who make sandwiches at Subway really "sandwich artists"?

  That said, an appreciation for the arts most certainly affects one's eye for design and taste. It is the difference between a good looking/feeling app and a great one. So much can and should be borrowed from the arts to build products, but perhaps such a loose definition of "artist" is unhelpful.

• by the-swa on 8/22/13, 4:14 PM

  Don't get caught up on the word "art" or "artists." There's a great article by Carolyn Dean[0] that goes into depth about the history of the word and the problems with it. What I got out of it is that "calling something art reveals nothing inherent in the object to which the term is applied; rather, it reveals how much the viewer values it."

  As a software developer, I consider software itself art because I understand the various complexities that arise when creating it, and also how it transforms hardware into something completely different (without software, hardware does nothing.)

  Would I compare software to painting, sculpture, or music? Definitely. But that's just me, and before you can convince anyone else otherwise, you first need to convince them to value software as much as you do. The same goes for anything: fashion, cooking, even natural objects and phenomena.

  [0]http://www.bucknell.edu/Documents/GriotInstitute/DeanArticle...

• by zwieback on 8/22/13, 2:37 PM

  To me engineering in general has a lot in common with art. Most customers never see the inside of a gearbox or a PCB. They don't marvel at the design of the lens or touchscreen in their cellphone. The difference between an "artist" and "engineer" is just the intent of the product and even that's a sliding scale.

• by Zigurd on 8/22/13, 11:29 PM

  Excluding the most rarified fine art, every creative endeavor is a balancing act of money, materials, time, and effort. Good taste and a sense of art is going to guide you to the best result that balances all those factors. What's different about software is that everyone who makes software for public consumption needs taste and artistry.

  Once you have your creation, you just flip a switch and as many editions as anyone would want can be created. This makes the boundary between art and commerce in software almost friction-free, unlike, say, designing a car where a factory costing hundreds of millions of dollars is interposed between design and replication.

  There are only a handful of big car producers and they only collectively need something on the order of hundreds to low thousands of trained designers. To these designers, art is part of their education. That's just not going to be the case for software developers.

• by spo81rty on 8/22/13, 1:36 PM

  I think this is very true. A lot of software engineers are very smart technically but are not good at designing products or understanding user experience. Everything is just 1s and 0s to them and rigid. I think the metaphor of a mural is a good one.

• by daraul on 8/22/13, 2:12 PM

  I feel like this article is close but slightly off the mark. Just noticing from casual observation, it seems like the point can be summed up even more succinctly:

  Great software engineers are (something else).

• by my3681 on 8/22/13, 2:20 PM

  After a lengthy argument with my coworker, we have arrived at the conclusion that everything may be art. Commence discussion below.