Structure and aesthetics

Published: January 21st 2025 (week 4 of 2025)

Cambridge Dictionary defines aesthetics as "the formal study of the principles of art and beauty". I like this definition. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an article about The Concept of Aesthetic. I encourage you to read it.

I like programming. And, as vain as it may sound, I like expressing myself through it; the way I structure the data and logic, and the way I format the source code. Think about the classic Greek epics eg, Illiad or Odyssey: the stories are impressive, but you can also look at the text itself and find that the hexameter itself has a certain kind of beauty.

What draws me to programming is the feeling of almost magical power—I etch arcane symbols into an ethereal medium and things happen. One part of what makes this so alluring is the illusion of creating order out of chaos.

To create the appearance of order I, personally, need regularity. I do not write classical poetry and I think formatting sources with clang-format --style=hexameter or ocamlformat --profile=hexameter would be a little bit ridiculous, but I want my source code to be aesthetically pleasing, though, in a way that is practical—like brutalist or bauhaus architecture.

This is why I like the Almost Always Auto style in C++, or why I consider OCaml and Hy to be "attractive" languages. Regardless of the technical merits of an approach or a language, the aforementioned ones just look aesthetically pleasing to me:


    /* C++ */
    auto const a = 42;

    (* OCaml *)
    let a = 42

    ; Hy
    (setv a 42)

Of course, the examples given above are simplistic, but they illustrate the structure well:

a leader announces what should be expected
the thing introduces itself
relevant details about the thing are given

I structure the shelves in my kitchen the same way:

a jar sits on a shelf, by its existence announcing that there is something inside that I can use
a label on the jar introduces the contents as eg, "Liebstockblätter"
inside the jar I find spices, grains, etc

I do not actually know what comes first—is it the desire for structure, or for aesthetics? I think both needs influence each other. Having structure makes me feel good, thus I came to associate it with the other transcendentals - truth and beauty.

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