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 has
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.