[syntheno]

I hadn't read Paul Graham's article until I saw this, so I read that first before diving into this analysis of it.

It feels like he missed the whole point of what Paul Graham was trying to say... like yes obviously painter move globs of color around and software engineers write instructions to a box of electricity, but that's not the high level point Paul Graham was going for. Also the part about the women was super cringy, it felt dated, weird, and unrelated.

I think from a high level painters and software developers are in fact alike. Just like how engineers have objective constraints to work with when producing a solution to something, the message that artists are trying to convey in their work is equally constrained in certain situations.

For example, in depiction of photorealism, minute details like glints of light in an eyeball can make or break a painting. Artists like Johannes Vermeer were even renown for utilizing tools to depict the physical phenomenon of light in their work, by using a camera obscura.

There are many other examples of physical phenomena artists have attempted to reproduce in their work over many art periods that are comparable to the objective constraints engineers have to work with, which I wont discuss in this comment, but even in abstract and expressionist work, a parallel can be drawn to engineering.

When artists create abstract work they take a risk and sometimes their work is misunderstood, mocked, or just ignored... much like many frameworks, libraries, languages, and software projects created over the years that attempted to push the limits of what we think we know about programming and software development.

The author of this post missed the high level point quite badly.

[jariel]

'Carpenter' is a far more suitable comparison because almost zero of software is written 'for abstract reasons'. Software is almost always written for practical reasons.

Real carpentry involves an immense amount of detail, nuance, and a number of micro-skills you'd never imagine just to do mundane things.

It also keeps the analogy that a lot of people think they can be carpenters because they 'can build a deck'. But even building a deck, well, can be quite hard and require bits of skill that can take years to develop. A lot of people think they can write software as well. Though it's possible to hack things together quickly, it takes years of focus to 'get good'.

I suggest that nobody in the educated class wants to compare themselves to what people often consider 'blue collar workers' whereas the comparison to 'artists' evokes a more supposedly distinguished aspiration.

Having known enough 'master tradesman' frankly I have more respect for them than most artists I know. That said, I'm not sure where in the quality range the artists I know sit.

[AstralStorm]

Again, you instead missed the main point of the article that you can replace painter in your sentences with any other creative profession (including even a physics professor or a joke like a wizard) it would be the same. Which makes the analogy terrible.

Heck, most of these adjectives would also fit other jobs.

Going into detailed comparisons Graham digs the hole deeper.

Engineering such as programming is subject also to constraints of purpose and logic.

Art is not even subject to having an audience, and limitations of material are almost completely chosen, not given. I mean, you choose to make a painting rather than say an art installation. You choose specific techniques, topic and media even in painting.

You cannot exactly choose an operating system or hardware for most programs, even the choice of language or runtime might be limited.

There is purposeless art. (The piece itself has no purpose, the act of creation might still have one.) There was never a purposeless computer program.

[hnzix]

There's a particular type of overly literal, pedantic geek who just cannot stand analogies or parables. It's a complete failure of abstract thinking and it drives me nuts, because analogies are a fantastic tool for communicating technical concepts to non-techies.

[lidHanteyk]

Software developers do not need to source pigments. They can, and do, craft every jig and tool out of the same ether as their main work.

Painters cannot create perfect replicas of their work. Every copy requires almost all of the skill which produced the original.

It sounds like you readily unify disparate concepts, even those which are not related to each other.