为什么编程很有趣？

江南柴进

这是我见过的对编程最优美的论述：

（摘自人月神话 《The mythical man-month》 作者Frederich P.Brooks. 作者是IBM OS/360程序员.）

The Joys of the Craft
Why is programming  fun? What  delights may  its practitioner
expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making  things. As the child delights
in his mud pie, so the  adult enjoys  building things,  especially
things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of
God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness
and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the  pleasure of making things that are  useful to
other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and
to find it helpful. In  this respect the programming system is not
essentially different from the child's  first clay pencil holder "for
Daddy's office."

Third is the fascination of  fashioning complex  puzzle-like
objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in
subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in
from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fasci-
nation of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried
to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the
nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the prob-
lem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practi-
cal, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally,  there is the  delight of working in such a  tractable
medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly re-
moved from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air,
from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of
creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily
capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see
later, this very tractability has its own problems.)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in
the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs sepa-
rate from the  construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures,
produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has8 The Tar Pit
come  true in our  time. One types the  correct  incantation on a
keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that
never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings
built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common
with all men.

人活着，如果没有创造，那么便没有任何意义。

coredump

“creative”

这也是为什么做IT的男的多，女的少的原因，因为女人可以create babies， 男人搞不来， 只好create 程序。

当然女人如果不生孩子，也可以从编程中找到乐趣， 不过生了孩子之后，兴趣就转移了， 满足感的需求已经实现了。