OT; Donald Knuth on beauty, efficiency, and the programmer as artist

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Friday, 27 March 2015 at 06:31:40 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> In this talk I shall try to explain why I think "Art" is the 
> appropriate word. I will discuss what it means for something to 
> be an art, in contrast to being a science; I will try to 
> examine whether arts are good things or bad things; and I will 
> try to show that a proper viewpoint of the subject will help us 
> all to improve the quality of what we are now doing.
> ...
> As I was looking up these things about the meanings of "art," I 
> found that authors have been calling for a transition from art 
> to science for at least two centuries. For example, the preface 
> to a textbook on mineralogy, written in 1784, said the 
> following [17]: "Previous to the year 1780, mineralogy, though 
> tolerably understood by many as an Art, could scarce be deemed 
> a Science."
>
> According to most dictionaries "science" means knowledge that 
> has been logically arranged and systematized in the form of 
> general "laws." The advantage of science is that it saves us 
> from the need to think things through in each individual case; 
> we can turn our thoughts to higher-level concepts. As John 
> Ruskin wrote in 1853 [32]: "The work of science is to 
> substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for 
> impressions."
>
> It seems to me that if the authors I studied were writing 
> today, they would agree with the following characterization: 
> Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can 
> teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand 
> something, it is an art to deal with it. Since the notion of an 
> algorithm or a computer program provides us with an extremely 
> useful test for the depth of our knowledge about any given 
> subject, the process of going from an art to a science means 
> that we learn how to automate something.
> ...
> From this standpoint it is certainly desirable to make computer 
> programming a science, and we have indeed come a long way in 
> the 15 years since the publication ot the remarks I quoted at 
> the beginning of this talk. Fifteen years ago computer 
> programming was so badly understood that hardly anyone even 
> thought about proving programs correct; we just fiddled with a 
> program until we "knew" it worked. At that time we didn't even 
> know how to express the concept that a program was correct, in 
> any rigorous way. It is only in recent years that we have been 
> learning about the processes of abstraction by which programs 
> are written and understood; and this new knowledge about 
> programming is currently producing great payoffs in practice, 
> even though few programs are actually proved correct with 
> complete rigor, since we are beginning to understand the 
> principles of program structure.
> ...
> A scientific approach is generally characterized by the words 
> logical, systematic, impersonal, calm, rational, while an 
> artistic approach is characterized by the words aesthetic, 
> creative, humanitarian, anxious, irrational. It seems to me 
> that both of these apparently contradictory approaches have 
> great value with respect to computer programming.
> ...
> When I speak about computer programming as an art, I am 
> thinking primarily of it as an art form, in an aesthetic sense. 
> The chief goal of my work as educator and author is to help 
> people learn how to write beautiful programs. It is for this 
> reason I was especially pleased to learn recently [32] that my 
> books actually appear in the Fine Arts Library at Cornell 
> University. (However, the three volumes apparently sit there 
> neatly on the shelf, without being used, so I'm afraid the 
> librarians may have made a mistake by interpreting my title 
> literally.)
>
> My feeling is that when we prepare a program, it can be like 
> composing poetry or music; as Andrei Ershov has said [9], 
> programming can give us both intellectual and emotional 
> satisfaction, because it is a real achievement to master 
> complexity and to establish a system of consistent rules.
>
> Furthermore when we read other people's programs, we can 
> recognize some of them as genuine works of art. I can still 
> remember the great thrill it was for me to read the listing of 
> Stan Poley's SOAP II assembly program in 1958; you probably 
> think I'm crazy, and styles have certainly changed greatly 
> since then, but at the time it meant a great deal to me to see 
> how elegant a system program could be, especially by comparison 
> with the heavy-handed coding found in other listings I had been 
> studying at the same time. The possibility of writing beautiful 
> programs, even in assembly language, is what got me hooked on 
> programming in the first place.
>
> Some programs are elegant, some are exquisite, some are 
> sparkling. My claim is that it is possible to write grand 
> programs, noble programs, truly magnificent ones!
> ..
> Another important aspect of program quality is the efficiency 
> with which the computer's resources are actually being used. I 
> am sorry to say that many people nowadays are condemning 
> program efficiency, telling us that it is in bad taste. The 
> reason for this is that we are now experiencing a reaction from 
> the time when efficiency was the only reputable criterion of 
> goodness, and programmers in the past have tended to be so 
> preoccupied with efficiency that they have produced needlessly 
> complicated code; the result of this unnecessary complexity has 
> been that net efficiency has gone down, due to difficulties of 
> debugging and maintenance.
>
> The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much 
> time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the 
> wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or 
> at least most of it) in programming.
>
> We shouldn't be penny wise and pound foolish, nor should we 
> always think of efficiency in terms of so many percent gained 
> or lost in total running time or space. When we buy a car, many 
> of us are almost oblivious to a difference of $50 or $100 in 
> its price, while we might make a special trip to a particular 
> store in order to buy a 50 cent item for only 25 cents. My 
> point is that there is a time and place for efficiency; I have 
> discussed its proper role in my paper on structured 
> programming, which appears in the current issue of Computing 
> Surveys [21].
> ...
> One rather curious thing I've noticed about aesthetic 
> satisfaction is that our pleasure is significantly enhanced 
> when we accomplish something with limited tools. For example, 
> the program of which I personally am most pleased and proud is 
> a compiler I once wrote for a primitive minicomputer which had 
> only 4096 words of memory, 16 bits per word. It makes a person 
> feel like a real virtuoso to achieve something under such 
> severe restrictions.
> ...
> When we teach programming nowadays, it is a curious fact that 
> we rarely capture the heart of a student for computer science 
> until he has taken a course which allows "hands on" experience 
> with a minicomputer. The use of our large-scale machines with 
> their fancy operating systems and languages doesn't really seem 
> to engender any love for programming, at least not at first.
> ...
> How did they develop their skill? The best film makers through 
> the years usually seem to have learned their art in 
> comparatively primitive circumstances, often in other countries 
> with a limited movie industry. And in recent years the most 
> important things we have been learning about programming seem 
> to have originated with people who did not have access to very 
> large computers. The moral of this story, it seems to me, is 
> that we should make use of the idea of limited resources in our 
> own education. We can all benefit by doing occasional "toy" 
> programs, when artificial restrictions are set up, so that we 
> are forced to push our abilities to the limit. We shouldn't 
> live in the lap of luxury all the time, since that tends to 
> make us lethargic.
> ...
> In a similar vein, we shouldn't shy away from "art for art's 
> sake"; we shouldn't feel guilty about programs that are just 
> for fun. I once got a great kick out of writing a one-statement 
> ALGOL program that invoked an innerproduct procedure in such an 
> unusual way that it calculated the mth prime number, instead of 
> an innerproduct [19]. Some years ago the students at Stanford 
> were excited about finding the shortest FORTRAN program which 
> prints itself out, in the sense that the program's output is 
> identical to its own source text.
> ...
> Another characteristic of modern art is its emphasis on 
> creativity. It seems that many artists these days couldn't care 
> less about creating beautiful things; only the novelty of an 
> idea is important. I'm not recommending that computer 
> programming should be like modern art in this sense, but it 
> does lead me to an observation that I think is important. 
> Sometimes we are assigned to a programming task which is almost 
> hopelessly dull, giving us no outlet whatsoever for any 
> creativity; and at such times a person might well come to me 
> and say, "So programming is beautiful? It's all very well for 
> you to declaim that I should take pleasure in creating elegant 
> and charming programs, but how am I supposed to make this mess 
> into a work of art?"
>
> Well, it's true, not all programming tasks are going to be fun. 
> Consider the "trapped housewife," who has to clean off the same 
> table every day: there's not room for creativity or artistry in 
> every situation. But even in such cases, there is a way to make 
> a big improvement: it is still a pleasure to do routine jobs if 
> we have beautiful things to work with. For example, a person 
> will really enjoy wiping off the dining room table, day after 
> day, if it is a beautifully designed table made from some fine 
> quality hardwood.
> ...
> Therefore I want to address my closing remarks to the system 
> programmers and the machine designers who produce the systems 
> that the rest of us must work with. Please, give us tools that 
> are a pleasure to use, especially for our routine assignments, 
> instead of providing something we have to fight with. Please, 
> give us tools that encourage us to write better programs, by 
> enhancing our pleasure when we do so.
>
> It's very hard for me to convince college freshmen that 
> programming is beautiful, when the first thing I have to tell 
> them is how to punch "slash slash JoB equals so-and-so." Even 
> job control languages can be designed so that they are a 
> pleasure to use, instead of being strictly functional.
> ...
>  Some tasks are best done by machine, while others are best 
> done by human insight; and a properly designed system will find 
> the right balance. (I have been trying to avoid misdirected 
> automation for many years, cf. [18].)
> ...
> Language designers also have an obligation to provide languages 
> that encourage good style, since we all know that style is 
> strongly influenced by the language in which it is expressed. 
> The present surge of interest in structured programming has 
> revealed that none of our existing languages is really ideal 
> for dealing with program and data structure, nor is it clear 
> what an ideal language should be. Therefore I look forward to 
> many careful experiments in language design during the next few 
> years.
> ...
> We have seen that computer programming is an art, because it 
> applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires 
> skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects 
> of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an 
> artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. Therefore 
> we can be glad that people who lecture at computer conferences 
> speak about the state of the Art.

The whole art/science vein of these Knuth quotes seems like a lot 
of BS, trying to situate computer programming in the 
long-standing and overblown science/humanities "divide."

He characterizes the artistic approach as "aesthetic, creative, 
humanitarian, anxious, irrational."  But of course, there are 
aesthetic elements to any human endeavor: the scientific camp 
simply favors different aesthetics.  Anything beyond the most 
rudimentary science requires a great deal of imagination and 
creativity: it just requires learning a great deal of technical 
concepts first that may be harder to manipulate mentally.

Of course art is "humanitarian," as it's subjective and aimed at 
a human audience.  Hard to argue the science that brought us 
modern civilization isn't a hundred times more humanitarian, far 
beyond the superficial sheen of "humanitarian" art he's talking 
about.  "Anxious" and "irrational" are human emotions often 
possessed by artists, not qualities applied to art, fitting given 
they cannot produce anything of the great value of science.

He is really arguing against the likely prevailing view of the 
time of programming as a dry, functional process and pointing out 
and pushing for the aesthetic qualities in programming, which is 
all fine.  But he then gets caught up in the false dichotomy and 
claptrap of the science/humanities debate, a lot of mumbo jumbo 
that is not worth getting caught up in.

He should have stuck to calling for more aesthetically pleasing 
programming languages and tools- the best contribution he could 
have made is to more precisely define what he thinks that 
aesthetic should look like- instead of needlessly laying out 
worthless and overly simplistic platonic definitions like the 
mindsets of Art and Science.  At least his piece gave us that 
"premature optimization" line, which is worth far more than 
everything around it.

There is a great desire by programmers and many other professions 
to see themselves as "artists."  Well, there is art in 
everything, but they're not, and they should be grateful they 
aren't, or they wouldn't be paid anywhere near so well. ;)