The Joys of the Craft

The Mythical Man-Month is a great book not only because of its insights about software projects. Fred Brooks also writes about the “The Joys of the Craft":

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expects as his reward?

• The first is the sheer joy of making things.
• […] Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people.
• […] Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning.
• […] Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the non repeating nature of the task.
• […] Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff.

Really worth the reading.