I was wondering and thinking and those kind of thing you do when you
need to concrete a feeling you have but don’t know how to express in
words… until I found this quote from “The Mythical Man-Month”
(Frederick P. Brooks, Jr) :
Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?
First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in
his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of
his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight
in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of
each leaf and each snowflake.
Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other
people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it
helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially
different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s
office. “Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects
of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles,
playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning.
The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine
or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.
Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the
nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is
ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical,
sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.
Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable
medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from
pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air,
creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so
flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing
grand conceptual structures.
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the
sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from
the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces
sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our
time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display
screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings
built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with
all men.