Programming: is it an art?

Ming Chow writes in his O'Reilly blog that a computer program is no different than a novel. Hmmm. Obviously both books and programs comprise words ¹ whose organisation is governed by syntax; both are written. But as activities writing a novel and writing a program are completely different.

For a start novelists are writing a story to please themselves. Programmers, on the other hand, are writing a set of instructions for a machine to meet their users' requirements. Novelists work on their own. Programmers usually work as part of a team. This means their work has to conform to common standards and have a consistent presentation. The only writers who have to work like that are a bunch of Parisian surrealist poets playing the Exquistite Corpse game.

I would particularly take issue with this statement:

Source code should be read like a novel, and great programs should be planned so like any great novel.

I don't think source code should read like a novel. Even back in the days when I was writing COBOL the code was modular. In the modern world of object-oriented programs, loose coupling, configuration files and code re-use any resemblence to linear narrative has gone right out the window.

Furthermore, few novelists do plan their novels in any great detail. Rather they start off with an initial idea, invent a character or two and see what happens next. It's not unusual to hear a novelist say in an interview that they were surprised by what one of their characters said or did. Most have only the vaguest idea of how the plot will resolve itself until they get to the end of the book. Which, on reflection, does sound a lot like eXtreme Programming. That doesn't do lots of planning up front either.

As someone who studied history at university rather than a scientific discipline I'm alert to the possibilities of regarding programming as an art. Although there are some similarities some similarities with novel writing I would regard film-making as a much more analogous activity. There's teamwork, the studio system, the need to meet a budget, open source as a Woody Allen/Russ Meyer independent movie maker, etc. Indeed, watching Lost In La Mancha, a documentary about Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to film Don Quixote was just like watching a film about a computer project crashing. But writing software is primarily an engineering activity. I find I get much more insight from pondering the metaphorical implications of structural engineering, classical architecture and town planning. These all feel like activities that have a greater bearing on programming than reading a biography of Charles Dickens.

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^{1. Except for languages like BF of course. (back)}