Programming as an art (Part II)

Computer programming as an art

By Donald Knuth

(read the first part)

Science versus art

It seems to me that if the authors I studied were writing today, they would agree with the following characterization: Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don’t fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it. Since the notion of an algorithm or a computer program provides us with an extremely useful test for the depth of our knowledge about any given subject, the process of going from an art to a science means that we learn how to automate something.

Excerpt from Donald Knuth’s 1974 Turing Award lecture, Computer Programming as an Art.