Re: Artistically creative expression has no role in software design

["Alexander E. Kopilovich" <aek@VB1162.spb.edu>]

Marc A. Criley wrote:

> In spectating the "SCO vs Linux" lawsuit (www.groklaw.net), a lot of
> documents of various types get posted. One of the recent references was a
> paper titled, "The case against Copyright Protection of Non-literal Elements
> of Computer Software" http://tinyurl.com/3tjqj, by Christopher Heer of the
> University of Toronto.
>
[...]
>
> One of the interesting conclusions of this paper is this:
>
> "Since the design of computer software is forever driven by its intended
> functionality and efficiency concerns, the room for artistically creative
> expression never arises.

It seems that the author of that paper knows far too little about art and 
artistically created expressions. Perhaps he thinks that art is overwhelmingly
not functional, but decorative... and that true artists never worry about
restrictions and consequences, being driven by mystical revelations.

I'd like to recall here an interesting (and not rare) kind of art -
propaganda art, which from time to time thrives both in literature and in
movies (especially in war or tension times). There are plenty of examples
of true art of this kind - and certainly the ultimate purposes of those
things were and are functionality and efficiency.

Another well-known generic example is architecture - one may recall that so
beloved by many in software world "design patterns" were largely originated
from the Christpher Alexander's work on architectural patterns - and then
read the first book in that series - "Timeless Way of Building" by Christopher
Alexander - and see the roles of functionality and effectiveness in that art.

Then, the author of that paper holds awfully narrow view for computer software.
It seems that he recognizes very specific-purpose software only - because he
spoke about functionality as about a compact and well-defined thing, which
does not need such artisitic features as fine balancing between contradictory
criteria. He surely did not ask himself: what is the functionality for a text
editor of MS Word kind, and how it differs - not in general, but in all
important details - from the functionality of a text editor of, say, Emacs
kind.

So I think that the quoted paper does not deserve further reading -;) .




Alexander Kopilovich                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
Saint-Petersburg
Russia