There’s this stereotype that programming isn’t a creative field, that programmers do nothing but mechanically assemble code all day. I find that really sad, I think if we did a better job of explaining how creative programming actually is many more people would be willing to give it a shot.

If you’ve only ever had a total beginner intro to programming, it might be really hard to see where the creativity comes in. Honestly, variables are pretty boring and conditionals aren’t much better. Programming gets a lot more interesting once you’ve mastered the basics, I swear :)

Programming is a bit like building things with lego blocks, except that you have to make all the blocks yourself. Building the blocks – that is, writing an if statement or creating a variable – isn’t that interesting, I’ll be honest. But once you get good at creating those blocks, that’s when you get to be creative. Just like you can build a castle or a siege engine or an entire lego Westeros out of simple little blocks, you can build amazing things out of variables and loops and conditionals if you’re patient.

It’s also a bit like pottery or wood working. Just because you’re constrained to making a usable cup or chair doesn’t mean you can’t be incredibly creative within those constraints. Even in visual art or writing you need sentences that make sense and a combination of shapes and colours that work. Jokes about modern art aside, you can’t just throw paint in the direction of the canvas and expect anyone to care what you’ve done.

There are always constraints on anything you make, programming just has particularly rigid ones. An imperfect sentence is still intelligible, but a missing semicolon will keep your code from compiling at all. For some people that’s more frustration than they care to deal with, for others it’s an interesting challenge.

Building your own project that does anything you want it to is pretty obviously creative, but what about programming at work where you’re given assignments?

Even the least interesting internal application still requires creative problem solving to add new features or fix bugs. There have been times when I’ve had to be very creative to change an application in a way that meets the new requirements without breaking anything that used to work and without making a horrifying mess of the code. There are often quick and dirty ways to make a change that just leave you with more trouble in the long run, and sometimes (in an emergency, for example) they’re the least bad option, but usually you think about not just how you can make the change that’s necessary right now but how you can set things up so that you can make more changes in the future without tearing your hair out.

There’s never just one way to do that, either. When you’re working through a beginner tutorial it will probably look like there’s one right way to build any application and you can’t be creative at all once you’ve decided what you’re going to build and what the user interface should look like. That’s totally untrue. Once you’re working on anything larger than a simple assignment to write a for loop, you enter the world of trade-offs. There’s never only one way to solve a problem and each solution has its own pros and cons.

For example, optimizing code so it runs faster involves a lot of decisions about trade-offs and a lot of creative problem solving. Optimizing code usually makes it harder to read, which makes it harder to update if you need a new feature or find a bug. This matters a whole lot when you’re running a business because programmer time is so expensive. On the other hand, if your program runs so slowly that no one wants to use it (and pay for it!), it doesn’t matter how nice the code is to work with. Sometimes you absolutely need your code to run as fast as possible and unclear code is worth it to get your game to run at a decent frame rate. Other times performance isn’t your highest priority and what you really need is to be able to read and change your code quickly because you get requests for new features all the time.

In short, I build things all day. How is that not creative?