It is a truth universally acknowledged, that programming is a commercially viable career path. Less famously so, it's an often underexploited complementary skill in many different occupations: as computers have gotten easier to program at a high level — by which I mean, to program at the conceptual level of the problem you are trying to solve — the combined skills of finding ways to make your computer programmable in useful ways and then taking advantage of that programmability are a strong multiplier in an ever-increasing number of fields.

But programming is also an intellectual and aesthetic activity on its own terms. Separate from its practical applications, and more so when this separation is deliberate and complete, it requires unique ways of thinking, for computers are among the most uniquely strange things humans have created. It's both infinite and precise; it affords the freedom of poetry if you will submit to the strictures of engineering, and it has the abstraction of mathematics but the being-in-time of played music. It's something you read, something you write, something, strangely, you run. It's not to everybody's taste, but so neither are poetry, theater, literature, music, or visual arts: these are all things that can be done as a profession, or as a tool in one, but that we teach, learn, and do also because they can be pleasurable and enriching on their own.

None of this is a priority. for too many — in the senses both of "more than it could be" and "more than one" — there's an imperious need for paid work; there are large groups in societies for which work-oriented education (as much as it can be used as a long-term trap) is an arguable need. I won't snub professional programming as any less valuable, or the choice to approach it only as a job any less valid.

But I do want to remind you, and mostly remind myself, that programming is a many-sided art with many sorts of rewards, and that focusing only on our professional personas, programming only as part of a job, or to acquire or showcase specific skills needed for a job, leaves aside a bright source of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, one with no higher claim to depth or universality than any other of the things we do just to do them — it's not above drawing, or music; it's no better than fanfic, poetry, gardening, online videos, knitting, novels, restoring clocks, or taking hikes — but it's no lesser either. That so much money and power is built upon it can make the fact hard to remember, but it's nonetheless true.

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