My Problem With Programming

How long have you been learning to code?

Cumulatively, probably two to three years. I really got into it in October. And that’s web development, what I mean when I say programming. First HTML and CSS, now I’m learning JavaScript. Still not fluent in that, I wouldn’t say.

You like it?

I do like it.

So what’s the problem?

Well so I do enjoy it, like I said. It is quite satisfying to build websites and see them work. But I can’t get away from this sense that all I’m learning how to do when I build websites is build websites. Does that make sense?

Maybe.

Scott Aaronson put it a way in one of his posts. He said that he opted for quantum computing over programming because only one of those things was going to teach him anything about how the world worked.

Ah. And you want to know how the world works.

Right. And I can do that in my free time, of course, reading and so on. But we devote so much time to just trying to make a living that it would be nice if those efforts happened to also be teaching me about the nature of existence and not just how to tell computers what to do.

So what do you do?

I have two options as I see it. One is to drop coding and pursue something else. The problem there is that I don’t know what I would drop coding for. Option two is to think critically about programming as a discipline and see if I might be wrong about whether or not I can learn something from it that might be relevant to life outside a computer.

Which one do you like better?

The second. Because again, I don’t know what I would do if I did drop coding, and I’d like to get a real job sooner than later. And webdev happens to be one that I enjoy and also has the potential to pay well. And the other thing is I don’t know that I’m actually right about programming’s potential to teach me anything about how the world works. There are plenty of programmers out there who are also philosophical. Paul Graham is a great example. But what I don’t know is how much programming informs his view of things versus to what extent he’s a programmer who just happens to also be interested in how the world works.

Isn’t he the one who defines programming as a mode of expression, like painting or sculpture?

He has defined it that way in one of his essays. He likens it to art in that yes, it’s a mode of expression, which implies that it informs his perspective, because what are you expressing if not a perspective? So there must be something there, some meaning-making element that I haven’t seen or experienced yet, that programming imparts to programmers. I think I probably need to find that if I stick with programming as a discipline, or I’ll burn out. Do a little more reading, see if I can’t pick up on the philosophy underlying it. Try the hat on, so to speak, see if it fits.