Building software is more like creating a work of art, it requires creativity in design and ample craftsmanship to complete.
Don Wells made this statement in his essay Agile Software Development: A gentle introduction at www.agile-process.org. He made the statement in the context of contrasting agile software development processes to those of older, more ridged processes. But the thing that really caught my attention was that he likened writing code to art…and said it was something that required craftsmanship.
Another great quote on this idea is from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, and Julie Sussman (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-7.html):
Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
This statement was made in the context of convincing readers that computer languages are a good medium for expressing complex ideas. Again this notion of expressing one’s self through computer code.
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