I'M TIRED OF HEARING THAT DEVELOPMENT IS NOT A CREATIVE FIELD! Creativity is emerging new ideas from non-existent ones. It is not confined to pretty designs or well-written copy. Sure, devs are logical problem solvers – but not a single dev will solve those problems the same way. Code is like the paint on our dark-themed canvases and you can see yourself out if you think devs are just robotic coding machines

While I'd like agree with you, and while I like stackoverflow, I think the rampant use of stackoverflow shows that theres not as much creativity as you'd think.

@aceface and the fact that a lot of stack overflow has 3-10 different ways to solve a coding task goes to show you that there really is alot of creativity.

All artistic fields have difficult tasks that are rough to do, and hard to grasp. The fact that stack overflow is a medium for sharing information in a Q&A fashion no way lowers the creativity required to solve the task. Good programmers will be able to sift through the answers the documentation and the customer/project requirements to create a quality and innovative solution.

@brettmoan How are those solutions solved? By using pre-existing frameworks? Being able to string solutions together requires resourcefulness. Creativity is about original solutions/works. Yes, companies patent original works, but thats on a smaller scale. How many of those same companies rip off ideas from other
companies?

@aceface the only reason I'm inclined to agreeing half way with you is cause alot of programmers (I use this term loosely) just copy and paste code until it does what they want it to do. a true programmer can write something from scratch and that's art. if you think development isn't art try to write a program that can fully write another program, while you can give it a bunch of code snippets and make it come up with a finished product chances are it's going to be ineffective at best. this is provided that you were able to make it work at all. a general rule that can be followed is that if it can't be automated it is art.

@jckimble there are counter examples. Google is literally made a program that generates art. Also, compilers can optimize your code. So the people who wrote that code wrote code to generate code. This is similar with machine learning. I think the pioneers had to be creative, but thats no different than the artsists and the people ripping off their artworks

your definition of creativity is the most on point definition i've ever seen :D

when artsy people say I am not creative I am going to beat them down with this logic :)

It is a creative field.

@Jumpshot44 agreed, but @aceface has a point. There are people scrapping by creating crap code from massive amounts of stack overflow reuse that have no creativity. The field itself, is a creative field, and their are fakes shamelessly forging art all over the place.