Programmers, Inventors, and Wizards; Or, Life After Learning Programming

Upon some mastery of programming, perhaps modern JavaScript, a nice and rich language that spans Apps, Applications, Servers and Web Pages.

You feel like you are able to speak with new languages, and many of your first steps reveal path other programmers took.

You stop seeing spreadsheets as tables, and maybe view them, as a reduced visual programming language, without the drag and drop.

And as you push visual programming to new heights, and people tell you, something like spreadsheets do it better.

You will have a massively overarching understanding, that surpasses even those who invented latest VPLs and all flavors of Spreadsheets.

With countless experiments across many years, you will develop sharp views, gain higher understanding in areas of your interests.

And before you know it, enter terra incognita, where you will be paving the way, building new pathways forward.

Your diagrams will be everywhere, and you will speak in your own terms, and often find it challenging to communicate with other programmers.

Once you are able to turn your thoughts into machinery, you turn to building tools and supporting machines.

You invent and reinvent factories, assembly lines, warehouses, and sometimes all in a singe afternoon.

You may take a concept you like, and shift to to new vistas.

Maybe take "This page does not exist yet, would you like to create it", as you see in WikiPedia and WikiWikis.

And create a text adventure game, where you generate graphics, maybe not even pixel art, and then select doors that you want to make interactive.

With a singe double click, you enter a blank room, with a message, this room is still empty do you want to create some more things in it.

And a few lazy afternoons or long holidays will help you build out an adventure world, unlike any other, full of strange AI generated art, characters with unique voices, and stories.

For a few dollars you can sell your game creation program website membership to young people from all around the world, some of whom will connect their worlds to make their games bigger.

Or maybe you'll create a visual language to communicate music ideas, to create pop songs that shift instruments or genre.

Maybe even with beautiful and strange pixel art, that will scroll as the song plays, creating a visualization or maybe a story.

There are so many directions, especially now with AI, that it is unfair not to be able to program.

And it should be one of the first things you learn in school, mitochondria can wait!

As you maybe able to launch your first inventions in seventh grade, imagine making more money than your parents, and then bossing your dad around.

Who wears the pants in your house, you do!

But it is the invention that is the most fun thing of all, making things born in your imagination real, like a wizard.

A machine engineer or car mechanic for example, cannot change physics, but a programmer, is not limited by any rules.

If you want to change something big, you just create a new universe around your programs.

For example change Desktops and Windows to Zooming user Interfaces, and connectable windows.

Where you can connect a digital camera app, to a simple folder, or gallery, or website, or pass it through an AI before you save it.

Oh, how fun it is to day dream, and scribble new ideas out on the back of an envelope, to try to see how far you can take them, in a universe of your own rules.

What was once boring afternoons, maybe in winter, now becomes barely enough time to sketch and try and implement.

And if you are the kind of a person that likes one idea, like games, or helping other people learn programming.

Then the fun you have begins to double as your life's work, way early on.

Where you cannot help but to change the world, with just the raw force of time you put behind your inventions.

Programming, truly is a superpower.