1st Edition

The Muse of Coding Computer Programming as Art

By Richard Garfinkle Copyright 2024
304 Pages 16 B/W Illustrations
by Chapman & Hall

304 Pages 16 B/W Illustrations
by Chapman & Hall

304 Pages 16 B/W Illustrations
by Chapman & Hall

This book gives students and experienced programmers a way to see coding as an art and themselves as artists whose personal views, experiences, and ways of thinking can make their programs better for themselves and their users. This book shows in a good-humored and sympathetic way how the artistic and practical sides of programming are the same, delving into the methods of coding, the history... Read more

Section I: Everything Humans Do Is Art

1. All Art Everywhere since Time Began

2. What Programming Does Best

3. User as Audience

4. Programmer as Artist

5. The Five Programming Actions as Techniques

6. Languages as Materials

Section II: Too Much Information

7. Information Theory

8. Human Perception and Measurement

9. Data as Information at a Distance

10. Data Structures as Architecture and Furniture for Data

11. Functions and Objects

12. Interfaces: Creating Shapes, Flows, and Empty Spaces

13. Practice, Experimentation, and Playing with Possibility

14. Artworks and Human Needs

15. Combining Coding with Other Arts

Section III: Foreground: Artist’s Life

16. What Is Needed?

17. What Do You Enjoy Making?

18. Working Alone

19. Working with Others

20. Clients and Audiences

21. Support Network

22. Making Money

23. Intellectual Property

24. Art as Life

Biography

Richard Garfinkle is a computer programmer and author of science and math popularizations and science fiction and fantasy novels. He is married to a visual artist. Richard attended the University of Chicago and majored in mathematics. He has been programming since the era of punch cards and paper tapes.