Is programming an art?

[psycopathicteen]

Interesting... Does that code work though? If you consider that bits 1 through 7 of $4016 can return open bus and Famicom controller data, these could easily screw up previously read button states.

Art is supposed to make you think!

You can't STX #8.

[tepples]

And you don't even need to use X when reading the controller anyway; you can use the result variable itself as the counter. Now that's art, if I do say so myself.

[3gengames]

And you don't even need to use X when reading the controller anyway; you can use the result variable itself as the counter. Now that's art, if I do say so myself.

I use X to see which controller I'm reading, I consider that art too. So many ways to do one thing, it's insane.

[UncleSporky]

I just grabbed it from an old topic I made ages ago, I'm not surprised it's full of errors. It's just to be silly.

[Memblers]

Funny pic.

Yeah, I think this discussion (inevitably with this kind of question) quickly becomes kind of a semantics debate. What is art, what is "not art", and what is programming.

My philosophy is that art and science are 2 sides of the same coin.. or think of it as a yin-yang, if that makes more sense. You can't really have one without the other, I think. A musician could hardly write a song without using the concepts left behind by Pythagoras. A painter couldn't paint without someone having used a method to discover what materials can create what color.

And we can hardly have science without creating a hypothesis (sort of an expression of belief, I suppose), and inventing experiments to prove or disprove them. Surely there is a bit of art in those processes. Otherwise someone could create a computer program to create hypothesis and design experiments, and eventually we would know the answer to everything - that probably won't happen.

So yeah, just like no one will claim that creating a soundtrack to an NES game is a science, it's able to work because it's using a very specific bit of audio code and/or look-up tables. And in the same way, programming a game requires a good deal of artistic vision to design it in the first place. If it can't be said that implementing physics in code is art (or maybe it can?), or writing a PPU scroller, for sure applying those physics or scroller into the gameplay is an art.

So I've abstained from voting, because I feel like I could vote either way. (but I'd tend towards yes, because of the implications of asking here, where we program games)

[psycopathicteen]

I just grabbed it from an old topic I made ages ago, I'm not surprised it's full of errors. It's just to be silly.

I love the quote bubble. That guy is acting like ASM programming is common knowledge.

[ehguacho]

design a full system from scratch is, IMHO, a form a art. anyway, which are the feelings or emotions behind Andy Warhol's soup cans or Jackson Pollock's pictures? i think that everything that came up from human's creation is a form of art, and programming it's all about creation, coding is just the last touch. i bet that there's a lot of people in this forum who are better programmer than Bill Gates, but he's on top because i had lots of great ideas, and that's because he was creative. so, voted for YES (:

[Banshaku]

Code: Select all

not_drunk_yet:
	
	inc good_times
	lda good_times

	adc #BEER 
	
	sta in_stomach   

	; TODO: Control yourself
	
	bvc not_drunk_yet
throw_up:

	jmp clean_the_mess

[tepples]

I love the quote bubble. That guy is acting like ASM programming is common knowledge.

If you appreciate that kind of humor, you'll love xkcd.

[tokumaru]

Code: Select all

not_drunk_yet:
	
	inc good_times
	lda good_times

	adc #BEER 
	
	sta in_stomach   

	; TODO: Control yourself
	
	bvc not_drunk_yet
throw_up:

	jmp clean_the_mess

This reminds me of last night (sans the "throw_up" part, fortunately!)... =)

Although tonight might not be so different either! XD

[Banshaku]

I just made that up fast based on the comment before that "art should make you think".

If you look at the code, it will only "throw_up" on an "overflow" flag. It was on purpose. But it would always overflow because it couldn't "control itself" because it was never implemented, or in other words, has no self control.

At the end I wanted to put an rts after the throw_up label to say that it could actually end up out of control since it was not a function and we don't know what is the last value on the stack, so the the rest of the job (in that case cleaning) would have never been done but it would have been a far fetch. But still.

As for the actual question, this is an eternal debate that will go nowhere so I better not get into it.

[tokumaru]

At the end I wanted to put an rts after the throw_up label to say that it could actually end up out of control since it was not a function and we don't know what is the last value on the stack

Drunk people often have trouble remembering to where they are supposed to go, so a random value at the top of the stack is just perfect! =)

[Drag]

You guys are nuts.

[ehguacho]

At the end I wanted to put an rts after the throw_up label to say that it could actually end up out of control since it was not a function and we don't know what is the last value on the stack

Drunk people often have trouble remembering to where they are supposed to go, so a random value at the top of the stack is just perfect! =)

lol, muito engraçado xD

[Banshaku]

Here's my final version then:

Code: Select all

;
; It's time to party!
; V0.0001a
;
not_drunk_yet:
	
	inc good_times
	lda good_times

	adc #BEER 
	
	sta in_stomach   

	; TODO: Control yourself
	
	bvc not_drunk_yet
throw_up:

	; Ohhhh.... Huupp!
	pop

	; I.. I'@3m fai!iine,..thhajjk ,yooyu.
	rts

Reflects my last comment.