The art of software

I've long thought that development is much more of an art than many people realise. Even people within the industry treat development as something which needs to be specified and that developers are little more than typists who seem to make frequent spellig and grammer mistakes ;-)

It's a strange view, but lets face it - development is fantastically artistic. There are many, many different ways to create a CRM system, many ways to build an email component, thousands of ways to create a user interface page which captures information from a user.

And in the 'real' world, we accept that some tasks have an engineering part and an artistic part. Take Terminal 5 at Heathrow airport. It has some obvious (and substantial) engineering requirements - it needs to accommodate over 30 million passengers every year and all the accompanying baggage (literally). And yet we are quite prepared to accept the clearly artistic approach taken by the Richard Rogers Partnership who designed the building. It exposes many of the structural elements to the users of the terminal and, although very much in the eye of the beholder, is acclaimed for its artistic elements as well as the engineering which has gone into the construction. You can argue the same for many other buildings, bridges and even the odd consumer device of late. The 'how' is as important as the 'what' - not more important, not less, but equal.

So are we treating development the same way? I see little evidence - we continue to focus on the engineering and leave little room for artistic flair. And why should we? What is the point?

I wonder whether anyone ever asked da Vinci, Brunel, Richard Rogers or Norman Foster?