[throwawaaarrgh]

Software was never really a "creatives" industry, in the way people and articles like this mean. It was, at the dawn of computing, the realm of typists and mathematically inclined women, then slowly through the 70s and 80s, increasingly nerdy men, including the "rockstar" neckbearded ingenious tricksters finding incredibly convoluted ways to save 500 bytes. Besides being "wizards" of a world most people could never understand, you had to actually bend your brain to find solutions to hard problems, because technology was so limited.

Now there are no hard problems. Just throw more hardware at it. Just write another CRUD app. Just wrap it in JavaScript. It is commodified because it's now a commodity. Software is ubiquitous and easy. There is no need to be creative, any more than for filing your taxes.

The people who like to program are, almost universally, nerds who get off on logic, solving problems, building things. But there aren't really new problems to solve. So they try to re-solve the same problems, over and over, without improving on what came before. Never satisfied. Software will always be the realm of these people that are obsessed with reinventing their toys in a sandbox. So the products will always be kind of toy-like.

That's why hardware gets better while software stays about the same. Hardware people can't just play with toys. If the hardware doesn't get better, nobody will buy new hardware, and they'll be out of a job. But people will buy different software and call that "better". Even though it's doing about the same thing as before, less efficiently.

[zelphirkalt]

To me writing software is similar to writing fantasy. You need to find good abstract concepts and how to compose them. Then you need to take care of how you put them in whatever language you use. I find it to be a very creative process and I pity the one who does not find their creativity at least tickled when writing code.

[throwawaaarrgh]

Writing fantasy should require what you write to be good, or at least entertaining, to sell; right? But bad fiction sells almost as well as good. You just need to follow a formula to put together the rudiments of something functional, and then find somebody who's good at selling. Slap a good cover on it, buy a good blurb, and get it in the grocery store.

Nothing personal, but you are who I'm talking about when I say nerds who just like to build toys in the sandbox. I don't think you intend on improving technology, or making a better product, as much as chasing that tickled feeling of sitting and writing. It's just amazing to me that people still get paid very well for effectively writing a copy of a copy of a book, while most fiction writers barely scrape by. You'd think the people paying us would just use the last book and not pay you to write it again, or demand it be better. But we're all fine with photocopied monotony.

[aprdm]

Don’t forget that Star Wars and Pixar were created at the dawn or computing too. What is creative for you ?

[throwawaaarrgh]

Creativity is tying one hand behind your back and assembling IKEA furniture. Or making a brand new film that's nothing like the old films, that says something new, tells a new story. Rewriting an old story with new words, using the same old tropes, will sell. But it isn't creative.