A couple of days ago I saw my friend sitting at his laptop with the facial expression that indicated he was at least creating Picaso’s work. I got curious and went to check what he was doing. Can you imagine my surprise, when I saw a black screen full of symbols, letters and numbers! I asked him what he was doing and the answer I got was “I am creating a program”.
Wait a second. Creating a program? Isn’t he just writing some codes? What is so creative about it? These questions have been torturing y mind for the whole day: I could not see anything creative in writing some digits to get a program running in the end. So I decided to see what other people think of it.
The first thing I did was googling “creative programming” and I got thousands of results: programmers’ blogs, articles in newspapers, even videos. Here are just some of the most amazing phrases I have read:
… I think creativity also requires some aspect of free will (within the constraints imposed by the medium, of course). This would manifest itself by the ability to intentionally create non-appealing results, but choosing not to unless using it as a form of artistic expression. Which brings up another aspect of creativity: expression. When you write a program, are you expressing something beyond the program itself?…
Programmers have to balance two very different worlds: a world of structure and a world of imagination. They create abstract concepts using very structured programming languages.
Almost 50% of the respondents agreed that when we prepare a program, it’s just like composing poetry or music.
Tim O’reilly’s study
When you’re programming, you have to focus on a problem for a long time and let your mind wander, as you imagine all the possibilities. It’s really similar to an artist, who gets lost in the process of creating a drawing, or a sculpture, or a painting. You’re writing code and you get into a creative place, a zone, and wow, you can really rock.
This was the point I decided that maybe I did not get it right in the sphere of programming. So I joined Malick, a freshman student in American University in Bulgaria, who studies Computer Science at one of the evenings he was working. You can see a video report below)
You probably have noticed how Malick was absorbed in what he was doing. It felt like I was and odd person in the room, when Malick was working on this idea. For him it is not just the act of inputting codes, it is the act of creating something new from the scratch.
You have to have a certain level of creativeness and imagination to build such thing.
This is how I figured out that for those who do programming, it is not just writing numbers. For them, there is a whole different world out there. The world of creation, inspiration, break-through ideas.
Click to view slideshow.
