That's something that they're supposed to have learned early in their BFA and/or MFA degrees, if they went that route. Otherwise, they have to learn it anyway.
I reckon one learns it better in real life, not all schools are enough good to teach you that. :)
This is a classic example of the ongoing (mis)communication(s) between artists and scientists. And far too many artists lack the training to engage with the real media of their work and instead hire technicians to realize it for them.
@ Derek: Agree with you, this is perhaps the focal point here. However, I would suggest to observe the same miscommunication not only from a pragmatical point of view (the artist might not know how to properly code something) but also from a conceptual perspective.
Maybe the artist does not always need to perfectly know how to code something, but the conceptual relevance of a work can be unveiled and successfully diffused even if somehow a work lacks of technical consistence, or does not fulfil requirements of a scientific paper.
Fortunately today's strands of "art" are manifold. Programmers are artists, artists are programmers, cinema directors become artists, sound artists become programmers, and so on... Art itself is mutating, increasingly faster since the New Media global wave. But this is probably OT already :P