Another mention of programming as fun (from Clean Code, 2nd ed)
-
I was just reading the introduction to Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software, 2nd ed. (October 2025)* by Robert C. Martin and stumbled upon this passage, written by his son in the introduction:
A couple of years later, my dad brought home a brand-new Apple Macintosh. It was AMAZING. “What’s that thing?” “This is a mouse.” So novel. And it had more games. Better games! The Mac lived in my dad’s office (basement), but when he was at work, the Mac was mine. Similar to the Lunar Lander incident, my dad spent weeks monopolizing the Mac to create a game he called “Pharaoh.” Pharaoh was much bigger than Lunar Lander. You were the pharaoh, and your goal was to buy enough oxen, plant enough crops, and sustain enough workers every year to build a pyramid before you died. It was a fun game, and I could tell my dad had fun building it.
Programming is so much fun! That’s the conclusion I had when I reached college age. For my whole childhood, if I wasn’t having fun playing on the computers, my dad was having fun programming them. Why would I choose any other major than computer science? Programming in college was … not fun.
That basically describes the effect of uni and work on programming, doesn't it? 😁😁
- reading on O'Reilly bookshelf subscription -- looks like the book isn't available elsewhere yet
Edit **
** Oh, here's a amazon link to the book - It was difficult to find the 2nd ed
Edit 2
At the end of the intro he offers 5 points of advice on how to best use the book. Here's number 5:
Have fun! Uncle Bob has fun when he codes. Trust me, he does. So do I. Clean Code should help you have more fun writing code too.
—Micah Daniel Martin -
I was just talking about this with somebody, and I can't for the life of me remember who or where despite being as recent as yesterday.
My take is work is work. They wouldn't pay you to do it if there wasn't a degree of toil involved. Easy enough to get people to have fun for free.
The ideal is, as someone said "if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life" but I don't think it works that way.
In my experience if you do what you love for work, work can take the joy out of it, in some cases to the point where it ruins the enjoyment altogether. I think vacations are important, for that, among other reasons.
-
I was just talking about this with somebody, and I can't for the life of me remember who or where despite being as recent as yesterday.
My take is work is work. They wouldn't pay you to do it if there wasn't a degree of toil involved. Easy enough to get people to have fun for free.
The ideal is, as someone said "if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life" but I don't think it works that way.
In my experience if you do what you love for work, work can take the joy out of it, in some cases to the point where it ruins the enjoyment altogether. I think vacations are important, for that, among other reasons.
@honey-the-codewitch said in Another mention of programming as fun (from Clean Code, 2nd ed):
The ideal is, as someone said "if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life" but I don't think it works that way.
Yeah, I definitely understand what you mean and I agree.
I've never liked that phrase either. It makes a person think that they should never face hard times in their work but as you said, "work is work" and sometimes it is "really hard (boring, exacerbating, painful) work".I also agree that getting paid can also ruin a very good hobby. I have a story I made up about a person who bakes pies everyone loves.
The baker is convinced to make a pie business.
Suddenly the baker who enjoyed making pies now has to depend upon it for income -- paying for bakery rental, paying for equipment, marketing the pies, getting people to come in and buy pies.Suddenly the love of baking is transformed into a tyrant which pushes the baker to survive and causes the baker to hate pies and baking.
-
@honey-the-codewitch said in Another mention of programming as fun (from Clean Code, 2nd ed):
The ideal is, as someone said "if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life" but I don't think it works that way.
Yeah, I definitely understand what you mean and I agree.
I've never liked that phrase either. It makes a person think that they should never face hard times in their work but as you said, "work is work" and sometimes it is "really hard (boring, exacerbating, painful) work".I also agree that getting paid can also ruin a very good hobby. I have a story I made up about a person who bakes pies everyone loves.
The baker is convinced to make a pie business.
Suddenly the baker who enjoyed making pies now has to depend upon it for income -- paying for bakery rental, paying for equipment, marketing the pies, getting people to come in and buy pies.Suddenly the love of baking is transformed into a tyrant which pushes the baker to survive and causes the baker to hate pies and baking.
@raddevus Indeed.
I learned the hard way, by crashing and burning out. Now I'm more careful with work/life balance.
-
I was just talking about this with somebody, and I can't for the life of me remember who or where despite being as recent as yesterday.
My take is work is work. They wouldn't pay you to do it if there wasn't a degree of toil involved. Easy enough to get people to have fun for free.
The ideal is, as someone said "if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life" but I don't think it works that way.
In my experience if you do what you love for work, work can take the joy out of it, in some cases to the point where it ruins the enjoyment altogether. I think vacations are important, for that, among other reasons.
@honey-the-codewitch said in Another mention of programming as fun (from Clean Code, 2nd ed):
In my experience if you do what you love for work, work can take the joy out of it, in some cases to the point where it ruins the enjoyment altogether. I think vacations are important, for that, among other reasons.
It's hard to disagree with that, based on my own story. Sure, it was fun at first, but there was a period of time where I would spend every waking moment working on code - my employer's, from 9 to 5, then as soon as 5pm rang, I switched to my personal project(s) until bedtime, and entire weekends were dedicated to them also. That was unsustainable and I should have realized that. I burned out.
These days it's extremely rare I spend any time at all coding for myself, unless I have something very small and specific. But I keep coming up with new ideas, write them down, and as far as I'm concerned, this is what's going to occupy my time when I retire. Because I still do love to code. But I can no longer code for work + code in my spare time.
