Why Is Programming Fun? by Ron Lichty

Fred Brooks answered this question so well and so poetically, in his 1974 classic, The Mythical Man-Month, that when I read it during my first year programming, I framed it. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

The whole Why is programming fun? section can be found online in many places - and more importantly in his book, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. It's short, but to quote a few favorite lines,

 "Why is programming fun?"
     "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 distinctiveness of each leaf and each snowflake.
     "Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people....
     "Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles....
     "Fourth is the joy of always learning....
     "Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed 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....
     "The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time....
     "Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us..."