As my facility with code has grown, so has my sense of taste. I see beauty in code much more clearly than early in my journey. This is true of other things in my life as well.
I agree with you. Skill helps you appreciate what is good taste.
Both come with experience and a willingness to learn.
I'm not keen on the idea of taste as simply some innate quality, rather than something learned / taught. Thinking of it as some X factor makes it easier to write off people who just disagree or lack experience.
That said, I've totally seen code with poor taste and I've written it myself, so I believe in the underlying concept.
They may not be _totally_ independent, but the correlation coefficient is generally nowhere near 1. If you have reached the point where taste and skill are identical, then either you have none of either or you have reached perfection.
That being said, as your skill improves, your taste is likely to improve because you are better able to differentiate between high and low skill work. But in many cases, you don't need any skill to tell the difference. It's not exactly difficult to tell the difference between a mediocre amateur singer and a well trained professional. Where it gets really tricky though is that you may find that you may not prefer the most technically skilled practitioner. There are many people who would rather listen to Bob Dylan sing than Luciano Pavarotti. Is that poor taste? I'm not so sure. It's certainly possible to acknowledge Pavarotti's technical vocal superiority while still preferring Dylan. Whichever singer you prefer, you don't need any vocal skill to immediately tell the vast technical difference between the two. Many things are like this.
Taste often becomes worse as you gain skill though, since you now start seeing trees and stop seeing the forest. A beautiful forest is more than a set of beautiful trees, so I think an expert on trees might be even worse at identifying beautiful forests than an average person since he will focus on details that doesn't matter much.
Same for singers, a technically good singers are often bad at identifying what people want, while more popular singers have better test so better able to produce what the crowd wants. But same problem here, bands often lose taste as they become famous, they didn't lose skill they are probably more skilled than ever, they just lost their ability to tell whether what they are doing is great or not.
Agreed. I'd say taste doesn't always require skill, but skill is necessarily accompanied by some measure of taste. It's even somewhat tautological in the sense that skill is the ability to generate something good, and taste is what defines what is good.
Skill enhances taste, developing skill gives you the experience needed to perceive nuances in design that other people wouldn't notice. But if you don't have taste in the first place I don't think developing skill will fix that.
I can't remember where I read it, but I recall hearing one time, "You need not know how to do something, just know how it should be right, making it will be simple because you will know when it's wrong"
It was in the context of I believe, creative work, people with good taste can produce good work by virtue of volume and discarding things that feel "off", regardless of initial skill
If you have good aesthetic sense but no skill, you can create good work. But not efficiently. You'll have a lot of false starts, trying things only to discover they don't work, retrying again and again until you find something that satisfies your sense of taste. Through this process you will develop skill.
Skill comes from experience. It means knowing what will or won't work before you do it, not having to make random stabs in the dark until you find something that works.
> Taste and skill are totally independent.
As my facility with code has grown, so has my sense of taste. I see beauty in code much more clearly than early in my journey. This is true of other things in my life as well.