See brilliance or... easy erasure? for my take on your last comment. :)
I agree that programming is definitely as creative as any form of high Art. It's a different kind of creative, though. Where art aims to mirror or affect the human psyche, programming is about creating an abstract process that transforms a situation. In some ways, programming is by far the easier, and that makes it easier to judge. Does your transformation work? Is the goal accomplished? In Art, there are no metrics. Get twenty people together and ask them what a painting "does" for them, and you'll get at least eighteen different answers.
In some ways, programming is much more challenging for the brain than art. We have a talent for meta-analysis that is rare in the general population. Holding multiple levels of 'what', 'how', and 'why' in your consciousness is both a talent and a skill. In my entire degree program in college Sociology and Psychology, I struggled to find the rare writer (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Howard Gardner and Neil Postman, as examples) who struck me as having any grasp of process and interaction beyond the linear.
A quick fix? Perhaps. I certainly know the heady rush that occurs when you come back from flow after creating a new gem. When I was a child, I was a raw INFP, but as I've grown and developed myself, I now test out as more of an ENFP. {These categories started with Jung and are well worth looking into; test yourself and read some of the comments on the web about _your_ type and those of your associates.} Now, rather than being satisfied with just creating an abstraction, I'm motivated to manipulate the systems of people around me such that my programming changes the way things are done here. For me, it's come full circle, for isn't Art about "moving" people to understand and do things differently? :D | [reply] |
