Comment by naikrovek

Code is “a means to an end” in the same way that children are.

But do we let ourselves loose awful people unto the world simply because they spread their genes as well as any well-behaved children? No we don’t. Society has rules and a lot of good people produce children which benefit society rather than are detrimental to it.

For a lot of people, the quality of their code is a reflection of their own quality as a programmer.

If you were alive in the 1980s and you were around to see how insanely fast a computer from 1988 could do things, and you compare that to how slow things are today, you would not be saying that code is a means to an end. Software is so horrible these days because too many people believe that it’s just “a means to an end”.

For some of us, the crafting of the code is the reward that we seek.