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 non-repeating
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 separately 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.
