Is Sport an Art? Options

[Tung]

We were having a debate about this in our Writing class earlier. Half of the class was split on this. Some say it is an art, some say it isn't. Opinions?

[Reidar]

Maybe. But the original point of the thread was to relate sport to arts as a creative medium (the modern, current use of the word "art"); arguing from a historical perspective may be correct, but I would say it's not in the spirit of the thread.

You were the first to even bring up the historical roots. It would seem that your initial contention was "not in the spirit of the thread."

I'll defend your past self and say that the historical perspective is necessary to shed light on why it is a creative medium. What was it intended to designate, and did the usage evolve beyond its original circumstances?

This may be so. But culturally, the Japanese don't make a distinction, at least not in the same way that a Westerner would.

Yes, they do. Culture is not mutually exclusive from vocabulary. A Japanese person is no more predisposed to label an engineer as an artist anymore than someone from another culture.

Okay. Well, I'm glad you can read Wikipedia,

I found this a little funny.

For one, that description was quoted from the official website, in the purpose of accurately depicting the characteristics that mere memory could not definitively verify (the audacity one must have of double-checking information!), so an attempted outing on whatever violation that using Wikipedia entails falls flat. The aspiration of "balanced functional programming with imperative programming" is a pretty common bit of wording floating about.

More fundamentally, what would have been unusual if I had looked at Wikipedia? It was in quotation marks, so obviously, I'm aware of whatever source I got it from. What's the point of hyperlinking to that same source?

but if you go so far as to read any interviews with Matz, or anything about his original creation of the language, you'll see that his motivation stems at least partly from the fact that he was trying to make programming an art form -- because culturally, he doesn't see a distinction between art and skill.

Matsumoto is an individual, not a culture. And no, there is nothing to suggest that he believes "art" and "skill" to be interchangeable. The fact that he pined for "beautiful code", in contrast to the programs that already existed, proves that he doesn't believe what you're claiming. He would not classify just any coding (which, by definition, would necessitate skill in order to even be the instructional system that is a "code") as "art".

Matz has often spoken that his real goal in creating Ruby was to make it fun and aesthetically-pleasing, in order to feel and express joy while programming.

From your source:

"I want to concentrate the things I do, not the magical rules of the language, like starting with public void something something something to say, 'print hello world.' I just want to say, 'print this!' I don't want all the surrounding magic keywords. I just want to concentrate on the task. That's the basic idea. So I have tried to make Ruby code concise and succinct."

Functionality was the primary incentive. Derived "beauty" (which was certainly a key inclination, to be sure) was a byproduct of adopting that policy.

True, but this refers back to my argument that the term "art" has certain connotations based on culture as well as time period. I'm not surprised that the Japanese may describe various martial arts as "arts", and I'm not saying it's wrong, but it's also a culturally different use of the term than we have in the West.

That passage was an example of the contextual usage being the same as the "art" that you perceived the topic-creator intended.