James Tauber

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Recreational Programming

In his post Recreational Programming, Sam Ruby says:

For recreation, some people like to do NY Times crosswords puzzles in ink. Me, I like tackling small, incremental, computer programming tasks.

I can totally relate to that, as I'm sure many readers of this blog can. But it was Sam's title that really caught my eye. Recreational Programming is the term my significant other and I use to describe my various open source tinkerings.

I think we came up with the term after a conversation something like this many years ago when we'd only just started going out and she had no idea what she was in for... 

HB: What are you doing?
Me: Programming.
HB: Late on a Saturday night? Is work really busy?
Me: No, it's not work.
HB: So why are you doing it?
Me: It's fun and it's relaxing.
HB: You find programming fun and relaxing?
Me: Yes. It's a form of recreation for me.

After that, the term recreational programming stuck. HB gets why I do it if I use that term.

So now conversations are more like: 

HB: What did you do last night?
Me: Recreational programming.
HB: Cool!

rather than: 

HB: What did you do last night?
Me: Tried implementing the Unicode Collation Algorithm in Python.
HB: You're strange.

Comments (2)

Tim on March 12, 2006:

I think the prime example of what you are talking about is that while ordinary ppl might relax doing Sudoku puzzles, geeks relax writing Sudoku solvers.

Non-geek: What are you doing?
Geek: Writing a sudoku solver.
Non-geek: Why would you want to do that?
Geek: *sigh*

SteveC on April 27, 2007:

You ever read the old Scientific American column by A. K. Dewdney called Recreational Computing? From the '80s. I think that's where the Mandelbrot set entered the general public's consciousness, and the other thing from that column that got some traction was Corewars. Anyway, it was thinking about that, and the recreational programming that I do which lead me to this site (I typed 'recreational programming' into Google.)

Disturbingly, searching for 'recreational computing' leads to lots of computer lab policy documents which forbid "recreational computing" by which I assume they mean game playing. Such a limited view of what "recreational computing" might be. They may as well say, "fun is prohibited."

I don't see a date on this post, so for all I know I'm responding to a post that's years old. Oh well. (The the previous comment is only a couple months old though.)

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Created: March 12, 2006
Last Modified: March 12, 2006
Author: jtauber