Programming Art

In the past few years, during school, I've noticed that there is a purpose to everything, and perhaps education makes this point clearer to me. The picture is simple, in order to do calculus you need to now how to do some algebra, and trigonometry. In order to understand the power of calculus it is helpful to understand the way of propositional thinking (that is proofs, which introduces things like set theory), and then finally to understand things like advanced statistics you need to be willing to think that there was a point to this mountain of mathematics, that set theory, and counting problems, and calculus are powerful tools for doing probablistic reasoning.

If one does not believe, or hold some confidence in, all the mathematics back to counting on fingers, the interelation between all these things is lost on that person, and maybe even the interelation of less 'scientific' or 'logic-based' things are also lost on that person. But the most incredible thing about art maybe this: it doesn't quite fit into that mold.

I read this in Mack Street, by Orson Scott Card:
"'...We're like artists. They don't make food. They don't make shelter. You can't wear a painting, you can't eat a poem, you can't put a song over your head to shelter you from wind and rain. But we feed them, don't we, because we love the picture and the poem and the song. Like we feed children, who also don't earn their place.'
'We feed children because of what they can become.'"

I liked it. It says that art is needed, but we can't exactly put together why we need it, and also why it appears to be worth so little when thought of out of context. It fits a hole in our bodies which we didn't quite know we were missing, and makes our actions threads in a grand play, and our lives artwork in an amazing universe. Our relation to that artwork the very relationship we have with the Grand Designer, the One who knew us before the founding of the world.