Today I asked myself the question: Now that I've established the beginnings of a career in programming, what is my motive for continuing to devote time to studying computer science?

Here is my answer:

The joy in programming is about craft.

Craft is a deep topic in and of itself. For now, let's say that it has to do with the intrinsic reward of a thing done in it's own right. Craft relates to that universal appreciation for the beauty of a thing done well.

Depth

I think it's great that you can go a long way into the field of programming without ever touching the theoretical aspects. That makes room for bright, talented new people from all kinds of backgrounds to join in a fairly lucrative and deeply rewarding field.

However, to develop a truly justified confidence in one's software design choices, a developer needs to see past the surface of the field and into its depth. It would be impossible for any craftsperson to really enjoy their work fully without an informed degree of confidence in the the quality of the results.

One could learn the basic syntax of a dozen programming languages and work on a slew of different web applications over the course of a decade all whilst remaining eternally a novice. Depth is the precise difference between this person and someone who demonstrates authentic understanding and lucid competence in their design choices.

Tangibility and Abstraction

Many programmers get hooked into the field by the awesome reward of getting a simple program to work and produce a satisfying result. The tangibility and immediacy of this makes programming accessible and fun. It's a great help to us.

However, to really understand programming we also need to develop a taste for understanding it as a fundamentally abstract mental discipline. This is really the evolution from "coding" to "software design." The reward in that mental discipline is different from the fun of getting a neat result quickly. It's a much slower and more profound reward that is characterized by the feeling of truly grasping a beautiful or interesting idea.

A programmer engaged in software design (which is, by definition, any programmer) is a very interesting kind of craftsperson. This is a craftsperson whose design artifacts hang somewhere between the abstract and the concrete. The programmer both embodies theoretical models in concrete form (coding) and distills theoretical models from some less precise set of ideas (software design). The need to morph between different ways of thinking leaves the programmer with much to do and learn in this life, but isn't that kind of challenge exactly what we like?

Inspiration

The Craftsman by Richard Sennett