software art ... not engineering

Software creation has traditionally been regarded as pure engineering (even clearly artistic aspects like user interface design and socio-computing aspects like human computer interaction and human factors have suffered as a consequence). Richard Gabriel, a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems advocates a programme that offers a "Master of Fine Arts in software", perhaps to restore the Poetry of Programming. With my ambivalent state of acceptance for Java, I rather liked his response to the final question on the page.