[netfire]

What do you define as creativity then? You could say that the majority of writing is composing sentences with nouns and verbs if you look at it from such a low level. (or that artists are just applying specialized techniques to add to or subtract from a medium).

I suppose that you could leave the creativity in engineering to other people (designers, product managers, etc), but my experience has been that you end up a far better product when you engage developers early on in the brainstorming and product planning process and let them help decide what the product should be.

[Duhck]

So this is what I was getting at precisely. As buckbova said, programming is problem solving, and solving problems is a creative process.

If you treat developers as creatives (like you do design, etc) you get a superior product and work environment, and you involve more people in the product brain trust.