> they just did programming for money

Very reductive. I would consider myself a pretty mediocre programmer, but worked with a lot worse. I care about making useful things for other people. I care about quality but less so than utility. If I ever get to the point to not need to worry about money, I will still focus on utility over any artistic notion of the code that produces that utility. Sometimes those things align, sometimes they don’t, but I’m much happier shipping a messy to maintain thing that is useful to lots of people, than something that is algorithmicly elegant.

Programming makes a lot of talented people useful, and the world doesn’t care too much about talent unless it’s a talent at sports or a talent at sticking it to other people.

I don't disagree.. I try to ignore what "the world" cares or doesn't care about, focus on trying to make other people/animal's etc lives easier/better than before I found them. Sometimes succeed, often fail, but goal remains simple and the same. "the world" can be cruel and bitter, but doesn't mean you need to play along. The amount of people that see hoarding wealth (aka greed) as a measure of success (aka good person/life/someone to look up to), is a massive source of the problem IMO as it is nearly always achieved by making other people/animal's etc lives harder/worse. The sooner more and more people look at greed with disdain rather than admiration, the less cruel and bitter "the world" will be IMO. :spock-hand:

So talent to you means amount of money you get?

It's a flawed concept based on an outdated view of human ability so... It can be anything we want it to be.

"they're very talented" is almost a slur, taking the spotlight away from the massive amount of effort and practice that "talent" is derived from.

I think almost all programmers realize they work for a business or are building one themselves. Spending time building something and focusing all your time on craft and beauty makes no sense in these situations. So, most folks that want to have an impact and progress their careers don’t focus just on that. When you have enough experience you start working on even higher level problems and don’t focus on the code itself, but more important problems the business needs addressed.

This is what co-operate management thinks.

I actually thought about “Is Programming ART?” But then I realized: doesn't pretty much every profession eventually start thinking of itself as an art form?

Maybe we humans just have this tendency to turn a profession into an art once it becomes complicated enough to distinguish the really good practitioners from those who merely do it as a job.

Or maybe, to take it a step further, we eventually turn everything we do into an art form.

So I'd say yes, programming is an art form, just like most things humans do. Most people just don't think about it that way.

EDIT: To clarify, I've never really liked comparing programming to painting or similar art forms, because they're fundamentally different. Cooking is a much better analogy for me.

Pushing out 10,000 frozen pizzas in a factory is cooking. So is making pizzas at your local pizzeria, or watching a world-class chef create a unique pizza in that moment, one that might never be made exactly the same way again.

We'd generally agree that cooking is a practical, functional activity, but that it can also be an art form. I think programming is much the same. It's just that most people never get the chance to see that side of it.

It feels like everything has endless fractal depth to it, and art is what we call it the act of compressing that down to something simple.

But you need some understanding of the underlying complexity to appreciate compression. We’ve all seen and tasted stuff, so a beautiful painting or a great pizza are easy to recognize.

Programming is tricky because the complexity is hidden. To laypeople it’s confusing, “why is a simple feature so complicated??” Even to other programmers it’s often non obvious. Someone could have spent days factoring the solution to a difficult problem down to 20 lines, but unless you've also wrestled with that particular problem, it looks like code anyone could have written. But really that’s the beauty of it. Programming is a big space to explore that’s hard to fully comprehend.

I don't just program for money, I do it to advance science and healthcare. I don't do it for the sheer love of reading or writing code. I don't care about the code, I care about what it does. I'm not sure why that's supposed to be bad, as though writing the perfect linked list implementation is better than saving lives.