The Beauty of Programming (2001)

(2001)

It was more fun then.

I like how Frederick Brooks put it:

"""

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 the 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.

"""

This is why you should program for fun instead of just for money. Sure its fun creating some interface for an API. Sure its interesting to figure out a problem some customer is having. Sure, it can be rewarding to create a new system as part of your companies product. But you know what is really fun? Creating something from scratch. Sculpting it. Refactoring it. Trying things. Cutting things. Learning things. Exploring new ideas. All of the stuff that typically doesn't fit well when money is involved.

If you really want to reconnect with the pure art of programming, just start a hobby project. Burn that candle at both ends. Grind through the self doubt. Grind through the challenge. Just keep perusing that 1 idea. If you finish it, you created your own little universe. If no-one sees it, who cares? Art is a form of expression and so is programming.

> Mandelbrot just made up these arbitrary rules about this world that doesn’t exist, and that has no relevance to reality, but it turned out they created fascinating patterns.

Er, no, that's not at all what happened. Mandelbrot was trying to model real-world observations like the length of irregular coastlines varying based on the scale of the measuring unit, and the growth and decline of pond scum populations.

Also

> As any mathematician knows, you literally can have a set of mathematical equations in which three plus three equals two.

is quite wrong unless you're simply redefining the strings "three", "plus", "equals" and/or "two" to mean quite different things.

> Remember the person in school who always got the right answer? That person did it much more quickly that everybody else, and did it because he or she didn’t try to. That person didn’t learn how the problem was supposed to be done but, instead, just thought about the problem the right way.

That is quite confused and conflates several different things.

> The story goes that the great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss was in school and his teacher was bored, so to keep the students preoccupied he instructed them to add up all the numbers between 1 and 100. The teacher expected the young people to take all day doing that. But the budding mathematician came back five minutes later with the correct answer: 5,050.

If this actually happened, I doubt that it took him as long as five minutes. And how does that square with "did it because he or she didn’t try to" ... surely Gauss tried to find a simpler way to calculate the sum. Also, Gauss had vastly more impressive achievements than this, although I suppose it depends on how young he was at the time.

> A great mathematician doesn’t solve a problem the long and boring way because he sees what the real pattern is behind the question, and applies that pattern to find the answer in a much better way.

Mediocre mathematicians do the same--I'm not even that, but I was on my high school math team and was routinely tasked with finding shortcuts to the answer. And great mathematicians spend their time creating (theorems, novel approaches, whole new fields of mathematics), not solving math problems (or calculating sums, which can barely be called math).

But yes, programming is great fun and much of that comes from the ability to make things happen in the real world--that's why I switched from my plan to be a math professor to becoming a programmer when I discovered programming while in high school many decades ago. And now I'm retired and still program both for the joy of it and the pragmatic results.

Programming is fun because in 99.99% of the time, the error is on my side, while the number is unclear when dealing with other humans.

Computers >> interactions with non tech humans (unless they are dead and wrote great books or music)

The "¾" in the text are actually emdashes. Clearly the text was AI generated, and then obfuscated to hide that.

My programming brain has two modes. One is playful mode, and the other is drudge workaday mode. 9-to-5 Monday through Friday is workaday mode. Other times are playful mode. As it turns out, I am a far better programmer in one of those two modes. It won't be hard to guess which one. In drudge mode, I may spend three hours some afternoon trying to force my way through a problem. No turning back, the clock is ticking! In play mode if I spend three hours goofing around with the exact same problem and it's kinda not happening, well, screw it. That was sorta fun, but let's goof around with it some more and try something else. BANG! Sweet clean obvious beautiful solution straight from Erdos' BOOK. The powerful sense of joy in the latter mode sustains my love for programming, but I wish I could convince my lizard brain that it would be OK, indeed far better, to stay in play mode and not get sucked into the dark doldrums of drudge mode during "job" time.

Nothing compares to the constant switching between feeling like the stupidest person on planet earth, to feeling like the smartest one.

The Graph. Infinite, computational, abstract. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the transforms. Time shifting through memory cells.

What did they look like? Tesseracts, polytopes? Stellahedron?

Were there monadic isomorphs, residual projecives? Both?

Did continuations self-order? Into simplexes?

I kept dreaming of an endless world of prime beings, I thought I'd never see.

And then,... one day,... I got in...

From 2001

I miss getting lost in something, forcing yourself to stay up to achieve the vision

Why did this get shared today, and why the excerpt posted on Bryn Mawr?

Not complaining. I'm just wondering if there is some context I'm missing.

There is this wonderful concept of "flow state", which I'm sure most of us are familiar with. It was originated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Many of us in this thread (and Linus's essay quoted in OP) are referring in various ways of getting into the flow state while programming.

Something I learned late in the game as a programmer is how beautiful it is when multiple people somehow sync up and get into a flow state together. It is like a choir, where everyone is somehow elevated and together they achieve a lovely unity. Or a sports team where all of the players are locked in, seemingly reading each others' minds, and getting to some amazing transcendent place together. The book "The Boys in the Boat" describes this phenomenon beautifully. When all nine members of the team achieve this sort of locked-in unity, the boat just flies across the water.

In software, there are times when ideas seem to pass with electricity from person to person. People immediately build upon the thoughts of others. Ideas seemingly come from nowhere, a synthesis of the conceptual pieces held by each of the team members. You realize that some wonderful new way of doing things has emerged from the dialog, and no one person could have possibly gotten there on their own.

There is a wonderful old-fashioned phrase that describes this: "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts."

Then there is the joy of making the program source code as easy as possible to comprehend. This motivation seems to be rather unusual among programmers unfortunately.

Totally describes my experience, since 1965.

For me programming is fun because it involves:

- Relationships with people - Creativity

You have to collaborate with people to fully understand the problem you are solving, and you can solve the problem in a creative way.

I liked my programming at work, but i love the programming i can do now with 0 pressure and constraints. I can see every line and working function mirrored in my real environment and not being extracted by some outside owner.

Then there's the free choice of hardware and stack, you never have to bend for some culture, styleguide or vendor lock-in. Blobs? coreboot makes your hardware feel like a living thing.

Since then i stopped to think of programming as work and dreading it. It's the complete platonic realm of ideas dancing in very real electrons.

Thanks for the article, it's a great reminder about how lucky one can consider himself and nice to see likewise minds.

Forge on!