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by rektide 1949 days ago
> But answering the question literally, I am not representative of everyone in the industry,

I am deeply /deeply/ romantic about programming, but industry is dreck. Unimaginative, low potential, sapping, low-ambition, filled with endless middle- & low-roads & compromises. Countless stakeholders, endless non-technical-personals to "reason" with. Plans & designs & endless corporate aligning & planning. All for middling corporate plans, faint progress, carried forward under the weight of countless legacy systems & terrible decisions.

Programming & open source is this limitless potential, this endless imagineering & exploration. We are unencumbered by anything beyond what we might imagine, what we might want to do, free to think of how we want to represent, structure, develop things.

Not everyone is into programming for the same reasons. But I find increasing distance, increasing inability to articulate to others how amazing being a programmer is, what expressiveness & power we have, how unencumbered & free we are. Even if others don't share the ambition & sense of grandiosity, don't feel the immense pull of the vast humanistic work that we distinctly are the crafters & doers of, there's still such power to create & share & inform that is so rewarding, so immense, so imminent in the craft, & I deeply deeply crave seeing some recognition, somewhere, of some of it- of themselves!- at some level, in my fellow peers. It's ok if we have different reasons, different motivations, different engagements, but there is a might of human potential here that programmers are so uniquely connected to, so immersed in, and I want these fish to realize the water about them, even if they only aspire to be small fish.

I affirm strongly the question: how indeed can you not be romantic about programming?

1 comments

Do you have any example code that enforces the idea of romantic to you? I've always just worked on business related tasks, and might have missed out on the romantic side of programming