Chris Kiehl is learning game programming by making a buggy Breakout clone with terrible collision detection. He enjoys solving its problems. His short essay makes a case for keeping that pleasure separate from the pressure to justify every hour economically.
- A hobby can be its own reward. Writing the game by hand gives him something he wants: the experience of figuring it out.
- Curiosity can take detours. Experiments with Java type safety become interesting ways of thinking about a problem, whether they ever reach production.
- Understanding can arrive late. His struggle with recursion schemes, patterns for expressing recursive computations, still feels unresolved. Some ideas take years to become clear.
- The discourse changes the experience. Kiehl finds that the feeling he should stop enjoying programming fades when he disconnects from the doom stream.
A weekend experiment can leave behind a broken game, a new question, or an idea that needs time. Those are reasonable outcomes when exploration is the purpose.
Kiehl’s closing line holds up on its own: “It’s OK to enjoy things. Doing so requires no economic justification.”