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1.2: Creativity and Motivation

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    2959
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    While this book is not intended for professional programmers, professional programming can be a very rewarding job both financially and personally. Building useful, elegant, and clever programs for others to use is a very creative activity. Your computer or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) usually contains many different programs from many different groups of programmers, each competing for your attention and interest. They try their best to meet your needs and give you a great user experience in the process. In some situations, when you choose a piece of software, the programmers are directly compensated because of your choice.

    If we think of programs as the creative output of groups of programmers, perhaps the following figure is a more sensible version of our PDA:

    Programmers Talking to You

    Programmers Talking to You

    For now, our primary motivation is not to make money or please end users, but instead for us to be more productive in handling the data and information that we will encounter in our lives. When you first start, you will be both the programmer and the end user of your programs. As you gain skill as a programmer and programming feels more creative to you, your thoughts may turn toward developing programs for others.


    This page titled 1.2: Creativity and Motivation is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Chuck Severance via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.