Post #2746343

2026-05-09 17:04 UTC

@jdw@mathstodon.xyz Do you think beauty and creativity are taken from programming? I think the opposite: Programming is now back to mostly that part that happens when being away from a computer. Thinking about structures, UI, design, etc. The hard, creative and beautiful aspects of it! Time spent typing, casing missing semicolon or reading API descriptions is reduced to a minimum.

Replies (1)

@jdw@mathstodon.xyz 2026-05-10 08:54

@tomkalei@machteburch.social I think there would be a lot to say on this, but I don't have the time right now. I guess you might be right with respect to the creativity and there are probably different opinions on where the beauty lies in mathematics and programming. I personally get the greatest aesthetical satisfaction from getting the details right in both fields. When thinking about a question in math, I might be stuck at first, then find a good idea, get excited that the idea *could* work out. Then I think about what exactly I would need to show in order to make the idea work, I will probably identify a small number of lemmas which I hope are true and I can prove and which would make my idea work. Then I'll sit down, try to prove my lemmas over a couple of days or sometimes weeks and after each proven lemma my excitement grows until I have proved the last one and I have this great feeling of satisfaction that the idea worked, that luckily all the steps fit together the way I hoped and that the problem I struggled with is now solved. I can't imagine getting the same level of satisfaction if I just did the first step, coming up with the idea, telling the LLM to work it out and move on to the next question. In programming, where I'm much less experienced than in math, it is similar for me. I might have an idea how some feature could be implemented. I'll sit down, type everything up, make it compile, fix the bugs I built in and in the end it's so nice if everything works the way I imagined it.

Open ##2746344