When people talk about creativity, they usually mean art, music, writing—things associated with images or emotions. But programming is just as creative, maybe even more so, because you’re creating something out of nothing, and the process involves a lot of the same steps artists use.

Coding starts with a blank screen, which is the programmer’s version of a blank canvas. Like an artist facing a blank canvas, a programmer faces a set of choices, an empty world with no inherent structure. Every line of code, every function, every loop, is a deliberate decision that brings some new function, some new form, into existence. And those choices are rarely linear or straightforward. Good code isn’t just efficient; it’s elegant, much like a well-designed building or a painting. There’s a kind of flow to it, a structure that feels intuitive even though it’s built from abstract logic.

In code, as in art, constraints can be useful. You work within the limits of your language, the performance of your hardware, the time you have. But within those limits, you can do almost anything, and the variety of what you can make is as vast as in any art form.

People might not think of code as creative because it’s not visual or easy to understand, but the creativity is there. It’s just made of ideas, not images.