I am so fascinated about this angle -- whether programming is art or not. This is one of the things that got me to HN recently and I love reading these discussiong as a non-programmer.

While I love art, I am not an art historian or critic, so the definition I have for it is highly subjective -- in my opinion one of the functions of art is communication with other people (often through time and space). For art to fulfill its telos, so to speak, the message that it carries must also be read (heard, perceived) by somebody and then, if it's great art, eventually someone would want to respond to it.

The message can be simple, complex, subversive, stupid, clever, it can be an observation about world, a joke, a profound truth, a memory, a question, a snapshot, a curiosity, a trick, and a ton of other things. And sure, the message can be distorted, misunderstood, twisted, forgotten, lost, etc, but if no one "reads" it and no one "talks" to it, it might as well be glossolalia.

So my question for folks who do consider programming art -- do you "read" other people's code like this? Do you exchange ideas through code? Have you ever trolled great coders of the past through your code or tried to prove them wrong?

I hope my question doesn't come off as complete nonsense.

P.s. I know that there are programming manifestos which to me sounds like there is a layer of meaning that the code carries and this meaning goes beyond pure machine instructions or software functionality, but I'd love to read answers of actual programmers.

> So my question for folks who do consider programming art -- do you "read" other people's code like this? Do you exchange ideas through code? Have you ever trolled great coders of the past through your code or tried to prove them wrong?

Yes, 100% yes. I have always said that I reading someones code to me is akin to reading a personal diary or memoir. It exposes so many thing about their frame of mind and world view. I consider it beautiful and the advent of LLMs greatly muddying this signal (it has absolutely not REMOVED IT) has been incredible painful.

That's a really good question! The code to the old software, the first version of Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, IdSoftware's Doom, are available on GitHub, and people have poured over them. Or more modernly, there's large open source projects out there currently. But most source isn't something anyone else would see outside of work because it's all proprietary software. Google's internal systems are a thing of beauty, but no one outside of Google can legally be shown them, so it goes unnoticed by the wider world. The closest thing we get to art appreciation thus is blogs like Raymond Chen's Old New Thing. He's a programmer with Microsoft that talks about what it was like to work on windows.