Software development is not an art. It’s a craft.

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
R. Buckminster Fuller - US architect & engineer

Forget about the “creation” part of the job. As you are developing your first application, you are not creating something. You are building something. Mind you, it’s not like building a bridge as in engineering or a plane.

The main difference between the art and the craft is the people inside the profession. Art is completely subjective. Anyone can be improvised artist and some may succeed. The difference between artist and programmers is artist that don’t sell get another job. Self-improvised programmers that fails simply find another company to hire him.

I’m not complaining about self thought programmers. What I’m worried about is the quality of the code we find in today’s software. Who saw some serious bad code here? Raise your hand! You’re not alone. Those code were probably made by people who don’t care about software or by people who never had the chance to have proper training. That’s where it’s important to realize that our profession is way more of a craft than an art.

Art is based on inspiration. Craft is based upon sets of rules and experience that will bring you quality every time you follow them. Artistic software development doesn’t care about the rules. Let’s pick a simple metaphor. Japanese sword maker. There is a reason why there work is recognized and of such quality. Their craft had hundreds of year to accumulate rules on how to properly melt the metal, forge the blade, etc.. The master know a good sword on sight and knows that there is very few way to reach quality. Young apprentice will train for years under their master to gain the knowledge they acquired and be able to reproduce success.

It will be harsh but there is only 2 ways to change the behaviour of those that don’t care about the code.

1. Train them (mentorship, classes, etc.)
2. Get rid of them

If you want to train a programmer, he have to attend conferences, user group and spend some time off work to learn about good practices, design pattern and software principles. Company like Object Mentor do offer training to raise the quality of existing programmer.

Our industry might not be as old as Japanese sword maker but we must start to get rules/principles as much as possible and encourage “artistic sword maker” to follow rules and principles. Otherwise, the only thing you will get is a cheap rip-off that will break on the first hit. We’ve all seen software that breaks on the first hit and we need to improve the average level of our profession.

UPDATE: Added a quotation that I think represent a part of what we are doing. Solving problems and then making it nice. But foremost, solving problems.