code as art

[Kragen Sitaker]

Dave Long writes:
> Digital art often may not be accepted in shows or contests, because it
> doesn't really have the notion of "original work".
> 
> Other multiple media, such as prints, photos, and casts, at least have
> a "master".
> 
> Legal fiction is currently all that makes source code resemble a
> unique (or scarce) object; at the information level, one copy is just
> like another.

The same logic applies to music and the written word, and it will soon
apply to film.  

In fact, in some sense, it already applies to film; when a film is
being edited, the decisions about which frames to keep and which to
discard, and which order they appear in, are all made with regard to
digital images of frames.  When the film is in its "final form", the
physical film is cut and spliced to resemble the digital "master",
making the physical "master" merely as a higher-resolution copy of the
digital one.

But, just as it is possible to write words in a physical "master"
form, so too is it possible to write code this way.  I have many
notebooks and scraps of paper with "originals" of software I typed in
later.  I don't think that makes the code any more 'artistic' than
code I've written in Emacs from the beginning.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
A well designed system must take people into account.  . . .  It's hard to
build a system that provides strong authentication on top of systems that
can be penetrated by knowing someone's mother's maiden name.  -- Schneier