I was in the programming channel of the lesswrong slack this morning (it's a group chat web thing, all are welcome to ask for an invite if you'd like to chat with rationalists in a place that is not the archaic, transient mess that is IRC. (though irc.freenode.net/#lesswrong is not so terrible a place to hang out either, if you're into that))

, and a member expressed difficulty maintaining their interest in programming as a means to the end of earning to give. I've heard it said more than once that you can't teach passion, but I'd always taken that as the empty sputtering of those who simply do not know what passion is or what inspires it, so I decided, since we two have overlapping aesthetics and aspirations, that I would try to articulate my own passion for programming. Maybe it would transfer.

Here's what I wrote, more or less

So, the problem that most philosophers in academia trip over, get impaled on, and worship for the rest of their careers, is that they're using great clumbering conceptual frameworks that they do not and cannot ever understand, that is, natural language and common-sense reasoning, as it were evolved by a blind, flawed process that has never embarked to write any apologia or documentation for its subjects. In programming, any ill-defined abstract concept is far more obvious, widely acknowledged, and mitigable. The act of programming is essentially the act of taking conceptual chimeras(the requirements) apart and reforming them into well-defined, practically computable processes. Debugging is the process of figuring out how you failed to articulate a concept properly, and identifying the problem in it. For an analytic philosopher, programming is not just an occupation, it's an opportunity to get paid to do good work, with the side effect of examining the nature of concept and thought and developing one's sense for details and definition.

Aside from that, I've always felt like programming is a very progressive process. In theory, once a FOSS dev abstracts a concept properly everyone else in the world can then build on top of that concept. No other field can progress as quickly and concretely as programming. (In practice, though, that is false. The tower of babel is collapsed and rebuilt every decade. Still, I've found it to be a helpful delusion where passion's concerned.)

It was well received. Maybe it was enough? I don't know. But I think more should be written on the relationship between the act of programming and the analysis of concepts. Every time I meet a programmer who clearly has enough talent to.. let's say.. put together sanely architectected patches to the source code of our culture.. but who instead recedes into their work and never devotes any time to analytic philosophy, it breaks my heart a little.