
Great Software Entrepreneurs Are Artists - vonical
http://robertsaric.com/great-software-entrepreneurs-are-artists/
======
my3681
Great software entrepreneur MAY be artists, but it isn't a necessity. Just
because you craft or make something doesn't inherently make you an artist. Are
the people who make sandwiches at Subway really "sandwich artists"?

That said, an appreciation for the arts most certainly affects one's eye for
design and taste. It is the difference between a good looking/feeling app and
a great one. So much can and should be borrowed from the arts to build
products, but perhaps such a loose definition of "artist" is unhelpful.

~~~
jaegerpicker
On the other hand I think this definition of art is too limited. Are
sandwich's art, of course not but art is about creating and communicating
beauty/emotion from were it didn't exist. Is software art, it's hard to say. I
tend to think software/code is something else. Some that is newer and
different than art but that borrows heavily from art. I guess the difference
is that I think the code itself is the art rather than the output. That said I
may be to close to have a fair viewpoint, I've named two companies based on
variants of the name Code art.

~~~
mathgladiator
> Are sandwich's art, of course not

Obviously, you have never had a masterful sandwich.

------
the-swa
Don't get caught up on the word "art" or "artists." There's a great article by
Carolyn Dean[0] that goes into depth about the history of the word and the
problems with it. What I got out of it is that "calling something art reveals
nothing inherent in the object to which the term is applied; rather, it
reveals how much the viewer values it."

As a software developer, I consider software itself art because I understand
the various complexities that arise when creating it, and also how it
transforms hardware into something completely different (without software,
hardware does nothing.)

Would I compare software to painting, sculpture, or music? Definitely. But
that's just me, and before you can convince anyone else otherwise, you first
need to convince them to value software as much as you do. The same goes for
anything: fashion, cooking, even natural objects and phenomena.

[0][http://www.bucknell.edu/Documents/GriotInstitute/DeanArticle...](http://www.bucknell.edu/Documents/GriotInstitute/DeanArticle.pdf)

~~~
the-swa
(And just to clarify, I wouldn't consider all software "art", but neither do I
consider all paintings "art" \- it's really about the user's/viewer's
experience interacting with the piece.)

------
zwieback
To me engineering in general has a lot in common with art. Most customers
never see the inside of a gearbox or a PCB. They don't marvel at the design of
the lens or touchscreen in their cellphone. The difference between an "artist"
and "engineer" is just the intent of the product and even that's a sliding
scale.

------
Zigurd
Excluding the most rarified fine art, every creative endeavor is a balancing
act of money, materials, time, and effort. Good taste and a sense of art is
going to guide you to the best result that balances all those factors. What's
different about software is that _everyone_ who makes software for public
consumption needs taste and artistry.

Once you have your creation, you just flip a switch and as many editions as
anyone would want can be created. This makes the boundary between art and
commerce in software almost friction-free, unlike, say, designing a car where
a factory costing hundreds of millions of dollars is interposed between design
and replication.

There are only a handful of big car producers and they only collectively need
something on the order of hundreds to low thousands of trained designers. To
these designers, art is part of their education. That's just not going to be
the case for software developers.

------
spo81rty
I think this is very true. A lot of software engineers are very smart
technically but are not good at designing products or understanding user
experience. Everything is just 1s and 0s to them and rigid. I think the
metaphor of a mural is a good one.

------
daraul
I feel like this article is close but slightly off the mark. Just noticing
from casual observation, it seems like the point can be summed up even more
succinctly:

Great software engineers are (something else).

------
my3681
After a lengthy argument with my coworker, we have arrived at the conclusion
that everything may be art. Commence discussion below.

