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You could make a good philosophical argument that a significant portion of the technology industry for most workers today is art. Code structuring and design is art. Becoming a good leader is an art. Scientific research is an art form. Teaching properly is art. We should not discount the creative aspect in what we do.



There is a useful distinction between art and craft. I'd argue that the things you mentioned can be crafts, but I don't think we should call them art.


> Code structuring and design is art

No, it's applied mathematics. You could argue that mathematics are "art" but then you would need a really wide and probably useless definition of "art" as almost everything would be art.


I see this a lot and never quite understand it. Code structuring to me seems more like a craft, something that is improved through experience and wisdom and not abstract rules.


> You could argue that mathematics are "art" but then you would need a really wide and probably useless definition of "art" as almost everything would be art.

I don't think that everyone (maybe not even every mathematician) would call math an art, but I think that it can be done without doing undue violence to the term. For me, what makes mathematics an art is its capability for creating and exploring unusual, surprising, sometimes delightful patterns, in visual and other senses of the term. I'm not sure I'd call that a definition of 'art', but I think that it's not so broad as to be meaningless.

(A quick Google for "math is art" turns up many other (probably better) arguments along the same theme. Here's one: https://hackernoon.com/mathematics-is-art-all-the-mathematic... .)


Art is a form of expression.

Software is a form of expression.

The two are vastly different forms of expression.

Personally I don't think that Art should be part of the process for a STEM degree.

That said, it benefited Steve Jobs and Apple greatly to merge the two.


So if everything is already an art, why include it in the acronym?


Yes, I suppose if we redefine the word "art", then technology would be art.


Those "Beautiful APIs", though




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