THE VETERAN NEOPHYTE

WHY WE DO IT

DAVE JOHNSON

In the interest of pushing back the boundaries of human knowledge in my own small
way, I decided to conduct a little survey via e-mail. I asked only one question:

What's so interesting about programming computers, anyway?

I sent out 87 letters and received 37 direct responses, a 43% return rate! This is a
fantastic return rate for a survey. As one respondent wrote:What an interesting
survey! Getting hackers to talk about themselves should be easy!

It was.

To alleviate your suspense, here are the top two reasons programmers program,
according to my survey:
1. Programmers like solving problems and puzzles. (49%)
2. Programming is a creative outlet. (36%)

In the survey itself I included some hypothetical answers to my own question, as
follows:

Do you just like doing puzzles? Is it the money? Was it a horrible accident, and you
were supposed to be a doctor when you grew up? Is it because you're really an artist,
and computers are the best medium around? Is it because it's the only profession
where you don't need to wear shoes to meetings? Is it because you get to hang out with
smart people?

Unfortunately, while this accurately conveyed my enthusiasm for the subject, it also
completely shredded any objectivity my survey might have had, and skewed the results
sharply toward the tight, square little box of my preconceptions. Note that the top
reason appears in this list, and furthermore it appears first. Coincidence? I think not.
As one alert respondent pointed out, I even blurred the important distinction between
what makes programming interesting and what makes it a nice business to be in.
Sheesh.

Abandoning rigor and embracing whimsy, I decided to dump all the responses into one
big text file and do a word frequency analysis of the whole thing, logging how many
times each word appeared. Ignoring the common words likethe and the expected words
likeprogram , the winner was problem, at 12 occurrences. Game came in a close
second, at 11 appearances. Three words tied for third place, at 8 occurrences:fun,
interesting, and think. Nowthis is a satisfying analysis!

Other frequently appearing words were these:puzzle, art, control, creation, enjoy,
paid, challenge, complex, efficient, god, high, hooked, money, music, play,and solving.
Taken together, they make astrangely accurate mantra about what programming is
like, and probably describe in a more complete way than any individual answer why
people program.

But let's look again at those top two reasons. In second place we have "Programming is
a creative outlet." That fact was mentioned over and over again, but creativity comes in
many varieties, and it's interesting to look at the metaphors people chose to describe
the act of writing software. Interestingly, they fell into three very distinct
categories: programmer as mechanic, programmer as artist, and programmer as God.

The similarities between computer programming and mechanical engineering may be
deeper than it seems at first glance:

I got hooked on erector sets when I was young.
-- John Powers

But if programmers are just frustrated machinists, then why don't they get up from
their computers and build real machines? Here's why:

On a computer, I can build an amazingly fantastic and elegant gadget, with thousands of
working parts all cooperating pleasantly with one another, and I never have to get my
hands dirty.
-- Jeremy Nguyen

If you're willing to build your machines behind the glass of a computer monitor, to
build them out of logical stuff instead of real stuff, then suddenly the landscape of
possible machines becomes effectively infinite. You can build any machine you
canthink of, and all those pesky, annoying details like friction and inertia and tensile
strength just fall away. For people who like to design machines, and especially for
those who aren't so keen on the grease and skinned knuckles, this is a powerful
attraction.

Other people chose to compare programming with creating art:

I'm not very good at art, but when I write something that works well I feel like an
artist creating a piece of artwork.
-- Kevin Mellander

My father is a painter, and I grew up watching him continually producing new artwork
. . . Software is just another medium, less messy, easier to change.
-- Fred Huxham

Programming is definitely a means of expression, and unlike other media software can
simulate everyother medium; in Alan Kay's words it's ameta-medium. For those with
an artistic leaning this is rich ground, indeed: you can create your artandyou can
create new ways of creating art.

My own favorite creation metaphor is programmer as God:

I like it because you can play God, albeit on a microscopic scale. It's hard to explain,
but writing code is like creating new life.
-- Dave Hersey

It is the closest I can get to being God (without lifetimes of sadhana). I get to sculpt a
little "life-form" that, while admittedly unsophisticated, has a satisfying degree of
autonomy.
-- Corey Vian

Since software is something that's dynamic in time and semi-autonomous, it can fairly
convincingly imitate living things, in much the same way that machinery often can.
But since the software "machines" that computers allow us to construct can be orders
of magnitude more complex thanmachines in the real world, their resemblance to life
can be much more compelling, much more striking.

The joy of solving problems (or thecompulsion to solve them, as the case may be)
seems to be the major reason people program. My favorite survey response of all sums
this up nicely:

The reason I program is because I'm a compulsive problem solver and my computer is
a never-ending source of problems.
-- Craig Prouse

It's the twin meaning of "never-ending" that I love so much here. The fact that the
problems never end is one of those "both blessing and curse" features that computers
seem to overflow with. On the one hand, it means that we have an inexhaustible source
of puzzles and problems to slake our thirsts, but on the other hand it means that we
can never really be finished, and like Sisyphus rolling his stone up the hill, we are
doomed to repetitive toil, solving the same kinds of puzzles over and over again.

Here are some of the other reasons people gave, which didn't fall neatly into any
category:

It's basically because I have all these ideas in my head, and a computer is the best way
to get them OUT of my head . . .
-- Jeff Barbose

Solving the problems is fun, but I must admit that I enjoy the company of the machine
-- it's not every day you meet somebody who will associate with you unconditionally.
-- Steve Beitzel

I program to get back at my senior year English teacher. I once got a bad grade on an
English paper, and she couldn't give me any concrete reasons why. She just didn't like
it. The computer, on the other hand, always gives me a reason why I'm incorrect. It's a
game I play with my Mac . . . There are a bunch of rules and it tells me (usually via a
bus error) that I broke one.
-- Konstantin Othmer

It's the one thing in my life that is easy to debug.
-- Michael Weingartner

These last two hint at something else that I think might be important. In sharp contrast
to the real world, the world of the computer is reassuringly knowable. What this
means is thatcomputer problems always have answers. There is always a discoverable
reason behind a computer's behavior, and I can't help wondering whether this is one of
the major reasons people get such satisfaction from programming.

Most questions we ask about the real world turn out to be hopelessly complicated. How
can we improve the economy? No neat and tidy answer to that one. Why does your child
love those particular red plastic boots so much? That's not really answerable in any
complete way. Why is ice slippery? Why is the sky blue? How do birds know when it's
time to fly south? None of these questions have clean answers.

Ironically, though, there seems to be a basic human need tofindanswers. Look at the
huge amount of time and energy we spend trying to discover and proclaim truths about
our world. Religion, art, and science are all manifestations of the human desire to
understand. So it's no surprise that computers, with their fantastically complex but
ultimately knowable behavior, are extremely satisfying artifacts to spend time
grappling with. Finding the answers can be enormously challenging, but there's always
an answer to be found:

It gives me one thing I *know* I can boss around.
-- Jim Luther

Amen.