Coding is a Superpower

“The ability to code is a superpower. It's the ability to give life to an idea.”

Why do you code?

There I was, at my desk and immersed in the flow. I was connecting dots, ideas, flow. I was building things.

"Why do you do this?" came the question, followed by, "What's the appeal?"

It's like this, I told them. It's a superpower.

What do I mean by that?

1. You can literally create something from nothing.

   With the right words and flow, it's possible to create an application, a website, a product from 'nothing'. I put this in quotes because in truth, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Coding a project in Python is not building something from nothing. Many, many people have contributed to building the platform started by Guido van Rossum. We use libraries to abstract away a lot of the repetitive work in coding.

2. It's very satisfying to fill a need.

   It's really cool to see a need and build a project or product that fills that market gap. I have built several projects that addressed a market-specific need. Seeing the solution used to meet a need is just awesome.

3. The computer does exactly what you ask it to.

   If the program does not compile or there is an error in execution, 99.9999999% of the time it is a failure on the part of the programmer. A failure of understanding, setup, syntax, execution. There's very little ambiguity in programming.

I am sure there are more reasons I will think of, but this is my initial answer to the question.