Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

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You are probably missing the context. To a non-programmer, C and Python look the same.

Take Citizen Kane. I'd call it a 7/10 film and kinda boring, but that's because I'm seeing it in a "post-Kane" world. At the time, however, it was so revolutionary that people still call it the best film ever made. Nowadays it's quite standard because everyone has been building on it ever since

While I'm not going to disagree with you regarding some art, there is a point to be made that what to us, un-cultured people, may seem like random scribbles could actually be something revolutionary. We simply don't notice it because we are missing the context.

I do believe, however, that you are right and that there's an element of luck too. But that's not exclusive to art - how many technologies are we using right now not because they are the best but because they got a lucky break at the right time? And then again, while many good painters may never get their big break, I doubt there are that many bad painters who get famous.

Thanks for your opinion. I just tend to disagree with your examples.

Programming languages are in their core something like a craft. There are about 700 languages and even if you know nothing about programming languages at all, if I explain to you the concept of how difficult it is to make one and that only about 700 of them ever got made, you will probably understand that this is not something a lot of people could do even if they try. It's also something that can be compared and gets popular and approved because of its usefulness.

The same can be applied to technology, the best technology will may not be the most adaptive one but we can compare them and if they would get the same possibilities (exposure, marketing, timing etc) people would probably agree which one is the better one to some extend (ebay vs amazon) I don't see the component in art. There is just to many of it and if we would show 10.000 people 20 artworks and let them rank them from best to worst I would imagine the list would be different from the ranking of art critics.

>Programming languages are in their core something like a craft.

Art has that too and programming is art to some extent. Art has a technology component too! Think about the hardware - in art that is called the medium which has its chemistry (materials highly depend on that), it's got tools and while the art process is analogous to the methodology of writing software, in art you have techniques and so on. While it is not a one to one relationship, if you're willing to stretch things a bit (solely for this exercise) you can see plenty of analogies. Your parent commenter has a very good point about context and your unwillingness to look further into it will keep you from seeing a wider picture. Sometimes it takes years to understand some fundamentals but in the end you still get people who disagree and the same goes in programming. Think about the enlightenment one gets when understand LISPs while others see it as a bunch of useless parentheses and so on. Art may be more fluid but so is software if you look at the bigger picture.

Thanks that's a very good point and definitely a new perspective

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