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You don't have to love the ride to enjoy the trip. Programming is just a means to an end. We love the end, not the mean. He's not talking about worrying "how so

You don't have to love the ride to enjoy the trip. Programming is just a means to an end. We love the end, not the mean. He's not talking about worrying "how soon can I go home today". You do have a powerful motivator, which is the awesome software you're gonna build. You wanna write code because you wanna see your own thing built and working. Not because you love writing text on the editor. If I could build great software without writing code I would. Unfortunately we're not there yet. As you said it yourself, most businesses now depend fundamentally on software. So being inside and working to make your code base as good and maintainable as possible, and understand those processes is important. So we do care about writing good software. But not because we love writing code, but because we hate that.

jiggy2011 14y ago
Right, but that's not an especially incitefull distinction to make. I imagine there are very few programmers around who love programming because it means they get to type lots of characters into a text editor in the same way that nobody enjoys sex because it means they get to exercise their hips. In fact this is probably a big motivator in the number of open source libraries available now, they were developed by somebody who wanted to achieve thing X but they needed to create byproduct Y in order to do that. So it makes sense to share by byproduct Y with the people who need to make thing Z.