'''"Programming Rant"'''

* Programming is about creating emergent structure with an evolving goal in mind.
* Programming is both about breaking existing symmetries and spontaneously creating new symmetries.
* Programming is about the creation, evolution and annihilation of patterns that serve as generators of software forms.
* Pattern languages are autocatalytic chains of generative rules that iteratively, through the application of one pattern at a time, create new forms.
* Programming is about genetic-like trials and errors that maximize a "fitness landscape" through better and better prototypes that grow through a process similar to morphogenesis.  Testing simply sets the expectation of what prototypes have minimally fulfilled a utility function.
* Programming is self-organization that produces self-consistent knowledge structures.
* Programming is better served by multi-paradigmic programming-genetic pool that includes constructs from all programming paradigms: logical, functional and prescriptive (OO, structured, etc.).

(back to MikeBeedle)
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'''Another Rant by a Different Individual'''

Programming is not an end in itself.  

''It is to the programmer.''

No one wants a software program.  Programming is about developing a tool that makes some job easier to accomplish.  It is a support task subservient to the needs of the end user.

''Wrong, while the result may be useful, many programmers themselves enjoy the creative process as a craft.  To that end, we often write things that have already been written both for fun and for learning.  Programming is its own reward!''

Programming is its own reward ''to you,'' but certainly ''not'' to anybody who is paying for the results. Most of us on this Wiki do this stuff for a living, and so need to meet the needs and expectations of those who are paying for our time and productivity.