Programming as an art (Part I)

Computer programming as an art

By Donald Knuth

CACM, December 1974

Knuth opens his Turing Award lecture by recalling that when Communications of the ACM began publication in 1959, the ACM Editorial Board described the purpose of its periodicals with the remark that

“a transition of programming from an art to a disciplined science must be effected.”

From there he notes, with some irony, that the field did manage to become a science, simply by deciding to call itself “computer science”, and that the remark implies there is something undesirable about an activity being classed as an “art”. Meanwhile he had spent more than 12 years working on a series of books called “The Art of Computer Programming”, and people kept asking him why he chose that title.

“In this talk I shall try to explain why I think ‘Art’ is the appropriate word.”

He tells the story of being asked about the title in 1966, over a meal with a friend at the ACM convention hotel, and of answering that he was naming the books after him: Art Evans. The moral is that the word “art” has more than one meaning, each of them quite appropriate to computer programming, and after several days in the library he concluded it must be one of the most interesting words in the English language.

The arts of old

Going back to the Latin roots, ars, artis meant “skill”, and the corresponding Greek word was τεχνη, the root of “technology” and “technique”. Before the twentieth century “art” was generally used in a sense quite different from the fine arts, and that older meaning survives when art is contrasted with science. The first medieval universities taught the seven “liberal arts”: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, at least three of which are important components of computer science. An “art” then meant something devised by human intellect, as opposed to activities derived from nature or instinct, and during the Middle Ages the word by itself usually meant logic.

(Continues in part II)