Is Programming an Art Form?

Recently, I’ve found out that almost all programmers truly believe that writing code the right way, can be considered an art form. This is my minority report…

Regarding intention… Although art is a term almost impossible to define, Wikipedia claims that art is a product of human activity, made with the intention of stimulating the human senses as well as the human mind, by transmitting emotions or ideas. I never wrote a class to stimulate the human senses, and I never wrote a method with transmitting emotions in mind; you write code simply to make something work, preferably in such a way that will ease testing, debugging, maintenance and future enhancements.

Regarding creativity… It is true that for any given software problem, there are many possible implementation solutions; all have pros and cons; some are more “creative” than others. But… in my book, writing code “the right way” means striving for the most simple solution (KISS principal), following known design patterns (GoF, Fowler, et cetera), standard practices (MS, W3C, et cetera), and sticking to a strict naming convention (MS, Sun, et cetera). Come to think of that, the more creative you’ll be, the more depressed I’ll be when handling your code. So, in my book, the best programmer is actually the less creative guy on the team; the one that copies as much as he can from books written by others. Not exactly your typical artist profile…

Programming sure requires intelligence, knowledge, skill, good judgment, customer awareness, diligence and patience, but I don’t see that as an art form. Besides, don’t you feel that programming is too much a left brain thing?

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p.s. I'm still waiting for Apple’s iWife with a big red mute button as its main feature.