On the beauty common to art and programming

On the beauty common to art and programming

In “Hackers and Painters: Creators of the Computer Age” by Paul Graham, a famous lisp hacker, he describes the connection between writing programs, design, and drawing.

In “Beautiful Code” published by O’Reilly, a top programmer talks about his passion for “beautiful code,” which he describes emotionally as “full of grace and expressive beauty. Even if you are not one of these famous people, there are probably many people who find beauty in programming, which is supposed to be digital and inorganic.

To begin with, beauty is subjective and has aspects that vary from person to person, but in general, beauty is considered to include harmony, balance, good design, the power to evoke emotion, originality, and the ability to bring out the essential characteristics of an object.

Considering what connects a chord to beauty from this perspective, the first is the beauty of the chord’s structure, such as its balance and symmetry. This can be contrasted with the aesthetic value in art, which is related to the design and expression of the work itself, such as color, shape, use of line, light, and space.

The next aspect that can be mentioned is the function and usability of codes, and in art, as described in “Kaido yuku: Tanba-Sasayama Kaido” and “Kaido yuku: Inaba-Hakiki-no-Michi“, I looked again at miscellaneous daily utensils and rediscovered that random beauty is created not from a sense of beauty but from a sense of “use”. There is a genre called “mingei” (folk art), which can be thought of from the perspective of the beauty of function and usability.

One of the world’s most prominent examples of this kind of functional beauty would be the activities at the Bauhaus in Germany.

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, and was a school that provided comprehensive education in art and architecture, including crafts, photography, and design. In the field of painting, there is Paul Klee (“Flora on sand”) and

Vasily Kadynski (Composition)

And Mondrian.

Am I the only one who associates these simple compositions with a lean, functional code?

For example, in “Point and Line to Plane” by Wassily Kandinsky, it is said that complex structures in reality are realized by combining simple basic components such as points and lines. In addition, in terms of function, there is a section on Bauhaus’s “Theory of Form.

In terms of function, the Bauhaus has crafted works such as Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair.

The beauty of the balance, symmetry, and other structures possessed in these simple compositions may be connected to a lean, functional code.

These functional artifacts are pleasant to look at as well as to use.

On the other hand, code composed in a language with a clear worldview, such as LISP, Clojure, and other functional languages, has a similar beauty. For example, in the presentation “Simple Made Easy” by Rich Hickey, the creator of Clojure he states that the purpose of creating a new programming language is to provide a language that realizes complex functions by combining simple functions that “do not mix multiple things into one thing. This is exactly what Kadowski is talking about. This is the programming version of Kadowski’s “Formative Theory,” and I think it can be said that these codes are as beautiful as Bauhaus paintings are beautiful.

Art and programming are both fields that require creativity and expressiveness, and such creativity and expressiveness are important factors in creating aesthetic value. The Arts and Crafts Movement in Mingei and the Bauhaus Movement for Design Connected to People and Society while Assuming an Industrial Age are based on the premise of “the beauty of things made by human hands,” and I believe that this applies equally to programming, which is also a human creation. I think this applies to programming, which is also a human creation.

The next article, “Generative Art, Programs, and Algorithms” will discuss activities to generate this art automatically.