On coding & creativity

Computing has transformed all our lives, but the processes and cultures that produce software remain largely opaque, alien, unknown.

This is certainly true within my own professional community of fiction writers: whenever I tell one of my fellow authors that I supported myself through the writing of my first novel by working as a programmer and a computer consultant, I evoke a response that mixes bemusement, bafflement and a touch of awe, as if I'd just said that I could levitate.

Most of the artists I know - painters, filmmakers, actors, poets - seem to regard programming as an esoteric scientific discipline; they are keenly aware of its cultural mystique, envious of its potential profitability and eager to extract metaphors, imagery and dramatic possibility from its history, but coding may as well be nuclear physics as far as relevance to their own daily practice is concerned...

Many programmers, on the other hand, regard themselves as artists. Coders - like poets - manipulate linguistic structures and tropes, search for expressivity and clarity. While a piece of code may pass instructions to a computer, its real audience, its readers, are the programmers who will add features and remove bugs in the days and years after the code is first created.

Good code is marked by qualities that go beyond the purely practical; like equations in physics or mathematics, code can aspire to elegance.

(From "Mirrored Mind: My Lifein Letters and Code")