zlacker

I have a strong background in both and I think creating good art is worlds more difficult than writing good code. It's both technically difficult and intellectually challenging to create something that people actually want to look at. Learning technical skills like draughtsmanship is harder than learning programming because you can't just log onto a free website and start getting instant & accurate feedback on your work. I do agree that it's very apples and oranges though - creating art requires a level of intuition and emotion that's mostly absent from technical pursuits like programming, and this very distinction is both the reason technical people can be so dismissive of the arts AND the reason why I think making art is ultimately more difficult.

>>Cadmiu+(OP)
This is a very strange thing to say since great art is often not technically difficult at all. Much of modern and contemporary art is like that, nevertheless the art is superb.

> Learning technical skills like draughtsmanship is harder than learning programming because you can't just log onto a free website and start getting instant & accurate feedback on your work.

Really? I sometimes wonder what people think programming really is. Not what you describe, obviously.

>>quonn+U5
I actually think a lot of modern and contemporary art is more technically difficult than it appears (though certainly not as technically difficult as making a marble sculpture or something). But fair point.

Not sure I fully understand your second point: are you implying that I don't really know what programming is?

>>Cadmiu+M6
I‘m not judging since I don’t know you. I see programming as the profession, grounded in CS and with coding being usually not the problem (instead designing the solution is the problem).

>>Cadmiu+(OP)
I was raised a lit and music nerd, then staggered into CS in college because it was a creative discipline that could pay bills.

Twenty years down the pike I've gotten pretty solid at programming, certainly not genius-level but competent.

I agree strongly that making art anyone cares anout is massively harder than being a competent programmer. In both you need strong technical abilities to be effective, but intuition and a deep grasp of human psychology are really crucial in art - almost table stakes.

Because software dev is usually practical, a craft, you can get paid decently with far less brilliance and fire than will suffice to make an artist profitable.

...though perhaps the DNN code assist tools will change that soon.

>>Cadmiu+M6
> Not sure I fully understand your second point: are you implying that I don't really know what programming is?

What search algorithms have you developed?

What non-trivial, non-Flask/Django/React, non-plugin/non-API tool, or library, or frameworks, have you written?

What actual percentage of your work output comprises computationally hard problems?

If we're talking programming, that's real programming, the kind you should be comparing 'hard' art to.

>>knight+Bn2
The majority of my career has been in back end web development so lots of work on APIs and related microservices. Judging by the tone of this comment I've probably never worked on anything that you'd consider computationally difficult. That being said, I've never sculpted something out of a block of marble or done a photorealistic painting or composed a symphony either. I'd say my technical skills are middling in both domains. I have, however, been paid for my code for the better part of a decade and I've produced decent enough work to be hired by major companies and consistently promoted. I've added useful features to platforms that many people on this forum probably use. Getting to this point in my career certainly wasn't trivial but it was much easier than getting to the point where I could produce any art that other people actually found compelling, and I still think I've only created one or two things in my life that were truly "good" art that meant something to anyone other than myself.