The feeling of control is complete.
I have a world that I can control in miniature. I can add things to it. I can remove things. I can test how it reacts. I can simulate nature. I can simulate my thoughts or my speech. I can simulate a spaceship.
A spaceship.
Remember the time when we used to play? That’s what coding is.
It’s playing for a living.
I have an idea and I shape it into what I think is an approximation of the thing I imagined.
Every program is a conversation between fantasy and reality.
And this is the whole point.
If you can dream something and explain it in a way a machine understands, then you can be paid to dream. It’s the closest thing we have to making a living from imagination.
That is why we do it.
Not for the money, although that certainly helps, it’s for the dreamtime. For those hours where the outside world disappears, and all that exists is an idea slowly becoming reality.
So when you picture a programmer, wrestling with a bug or a more elegant solution, don’t feel sorry for them.
Envy them. They get to spend some of their days dreaming.
Why would you do anything else?
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Picture is a detail from portrait de Michel Bignou – “Le petit Bignou”, Raoul Dufy 1934