One of the interesting by-products resulting from the collision of software, art and design worlds is the resurgence of the notion of “programmer as artist” that is often mentioned when software developers talk of the “elegance of code” and “the art of programming”. Generative art, by definition, arises from some programmatic process, which in the age of computers is most often an algorithm running on software code. The curious convergence of code and art allows its respective practitioners to delve into the other side with some degree of authority; that is to say, artists become coders and coders become artists. If challenged, each group can fall back to some degree on their own area expertise to justify their work…

Maciej Ceglowski, a Perl programmer and painter, writes an interesting article on the distinction between exactly that – programmers and painters.

The Art of Programming is also incidentally the title of the printed proceedings of the digital art conference Sonics Acts 2001.