While I don't disagree with the article, this quote better sums up how I feel about programming.
> 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... 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... The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time.
-Fred Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month
In deference to the counterpoints in this thread, a lot of the "poetry" we actually encounter seems to have been written by Vogons.
I love that quoute! The whole "The Joys of the Craft" is well worth reading. It also includes:
- The sheer joy of making things
- The pleasure of making things that are useful to other people
- 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 joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task
I was burned out at a programming job and thinking about finding something else to do when I first read this section in 'The Mythical Man Month.' It reminded me of the wonder I'd felt at first, and that was still in there, and it became part of what has kept me hanging around the profession for another 30 years or so, so far.
I think that's why so many of my peers (including myself) are keen on removing ambiguity from code. Code itself should be as clear as possible and only able to be interpreted by readers in the way it's meant to convey instructions.
However the solutions are where the elegance, creativity and poetry should lie.
> 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... 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... The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time.
-Fred Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month
In deference to the counterpoints in this thread, a lot of the "poetry" we actually encounter seems to have been written by Vogons.