Artisanal Programming

Music City Center 

The *magnum opus* in the field of computer programming is surely Knuth's unfinished and provocatively-titled *The Art of Computer Programming*. Yet while computer programming can create art, few would characterize computer code itself *as* art, since it generally lacks the expressiveness and emotional connection that defines art. However, Knuth and many others do recognize computer code as a medium for expressing ideas, similar to the way we think about writing. Explicitly linking the two, Hermanns (2017) reminds us that "programming is writing is programming," and Vee (2017) goes so far as to argue that the ability to interpret computer code is becoming a new form of literacy. The latter argument dovetails with Nolan and Temple Lang (2010)'s call to integrate computing into the curriculum: if indeed the ability to read and write computer code is a necessary skill for producing high-quality statistics and data science work, then we should teach more of it. But all of these arguments were made before the recent advances in generative artificial intelligence, which is now capable of fitting and interpreting statistical models, analyzing data, and writing functioning computer code. With all this in mind, we introduce the notion of "artisanal programming" and ponder its place in higher education in the near future.