Programming

Creativity In Programming

I was recently having a discussion with my brother about creativity. In particular the creativity involved in programming. Most of the time people don’t really think of programmers as the creative type but I have to disagree to a certain extent. I am going to base most of my discussion on the technical definition of creativity, seen in the Wikipedia quote.

Creativity (or “creativeness”) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts.
- Wikipedia

Looking at the first part of this of the definition I think it is easy to see why programming involves so much creativity. Now this does however depend on the role of the programmer doing the programming. Creating an html page for the one-thousandth time doesn’t take much creativity but on the other end creating a robust server client application for a multi-player game often involves generating many new ideas and concepts. In this particular example the ideas and concepts would be focuses around creating a new protocol or working on reducing bandwidth used by the game. This is where a programmer really gets to show his or her creativity.

When contemplating all the different programmers there are out there I think they really fall into one of three categories, repetitive programmer, creative programmer, or a combination. There are many programmers out there that prefer to program the same solution over and over, these people prefer to know exactly what they are going to program and how – they are not interested on how we get to the solution. The second set of programmers are at the other extreme, these people truly prefer coming up with the solution and are completely bored with programming the same thing day after day. The final group falls somewhere between the two. Personally I think I fall into the second category but there are days where I don’t want to have to use my brain to push out any useful code.

As always there are many ways the definition of creativity can be interpreted but I truly feel that programmers are one of many creative technical fields out there today. They aren’t writers or designers by any mean but I think that is a different kind of creativity. Feel free to let me know where you think I am wrong or right.

© 2008 A Man Known as Charlie.