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Would you program if you weren't getting paid and it could never be used by others?

Maybe, you'd get bored, I suppose. Give yourself 15 solid years to scratch all your itches. Then, what? You made a 3-axis milling machine with CAD/CAM. Now, robots are "meh." You made SimStructure. Now control systems are "meh". You made an operating system with compiler and shit-loads of little things. Meh.

Now, you feel stupid. The cake is a lie.

As an 8 year art major who wandered across the campus to the keypunch room (run by the business school as at that time there was no computer department) I sat down, learned to program and discovered that there was (at an abstract level at least) no difference between say sculpting and programming. Design is design. More importantly I got just as much of a ‘creative fix’ from the one activity as the other. Now more than 35 years later, I have found nothing to change my mind. The creative element is truly why I keep programming (I’ll also admit to a slight addiction to learning new languages ) Nice article—just thought I’d explain why I’m still at it almost 4 decades in!