Code has art movements too
Cave paintings and Assembly, the Renaissance and the personal computer, Baroque websites, and open source as Pop Art.
So far we’ve compared single paintings to single pieces of code. Let’s zoom out. Way out.
Art didn’t evolve randomly. It moved in movements, schools and philosophies, and each one reflected what people valued at the time. I think code has its own movements too. Here is my very unofficial art history of programming.
prehistoric: cave paintings and Assembly
Cave painting at Lascaux, around 17,000 years old.
The first art was made with basic tools and simple shapes on cave walls. Primal, yes. But it laid the foundation for everything that came after.
Prehistoric coding looked similar: Assembly, FORTRAN. Raw, close to the metal, and revolutionary for its time. Our ancestors drew bison. Ours moved registers around. Both were groundbreaking.
Renaissance: the personal computer
The Renaissance was a rebirth of knowledge and curiosity. It blended art and science, challenged long-held beliefs, and gave us people like Leonardo da Vinci, whose impact we still feel today.
Now think about what personal computing did in the 80s and 90s. Graphical interfaces, C++, Java, the web. Technology became a canvas for creativity. The Renaissance gave us the Mona Lisa. This era gave us Windows, the Mac and the World Wide Web.
Baroque: the early web
Baroque art is grandeur and drama. Gold, swirls, intensity, detail on top of detail. Bold, powerful, and occasionally a bit much.
When I think of drama and over-the-top execution, I think of the early web. Glitter text. Autoplaying music. Spinning GIFs. Style over efficiency, every single time. Remember those websites from the 2000s? Total Baroque vibes.
Pop Art: open source
Pop Art took everyday things, soup cans and comic strips, and made them bright, bold and accessible. Art stopped being only for galleries.
Today’s equivalent? The modern frameworks and tools that opened up building software to so many more people: WordPress, React, low-code. And open source most of all: bold, collaborative, remixable, made by people, for people. GitHub repos are the soup cans of our era. Replicable, shareable, iconic.
what each era valued
Every movement, in art and in tech, shows what we cared about at the time: efficiency, creativity, accessibility, beauty.
Which makes me wonder what the next movement will be. We’re living through one right now, with AI writing more and more of the code. Every movement so far had a style you could recognise. I hope ours still has a signature at the bottom of the painting.
In the last entry of this series, let’s stop comparing and start learning: what would a painter tell a developer?