But I can be extremely creative in Excel! It can be programmed from the inside and from the outside in more complex programming languages. But that's my biased view where finding a way to implement something is perceived as creative. For non-programmers, I'm implementing something boring in fundamentally the only possible and utterly boring way: the program will get some boring input and produce even more boring output. Whatever you do, you're just making the connection between the two, which everybody can explain in a few sentences, in general. Duh! Everything else are boring details needed because the boring computers need them. And I, they observe, am earning my salary because I'm stupid enough to spend my time on that. Somebody has to do that too.
And don't think the people who claim that are stupid. A quote from Richard Feynman himself, describing events in 1940-ties:
"Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.
After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.
Absolutely useless. We had tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the delight in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing."
(Of course, finding a best way to calculate arc-tangent on a given platform is a serious task. We know that. Somebody has to do that too. Naive approach will get a lot of errors, and also be to slow compared to the good investigated approach. That, it can be said, is an engineering problem, not a problem for a "developer." But still, we're just moving towards the "only" effective and correct way. But if we consider it "fun", well, poor we).
But the playing is essential! Without the playing you'd never get past first base. If I wouldn't actually enjoy this stuff I would have stopped doing it long ago.
And don't think the people who claim that are stupid. A quote from Richard Feynman himself, describing events in 1940-ties:
"Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.
After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.
Absolutely useless. We had tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the delight in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing."
http://benjaminjcousins.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/richard-fey...
(Of course, finding a best way to calculate arc-tangent on a given platform is a serious task. We know that. Somebody has to do that too. Naive approach will get a lot of errors, and also be to slow compared to the good investigated approach. That, it can be said, is an engineering problem, not a problem for a "developer." But still, we're just moving towards the "only" effective and correct way. But if we consider it "fun", well, poor we).