Why Programming Feels Like Building Your Own World – Lessons from Linus Torvalds

Introduction: This excerpt is taken from Linus Torvalds' autobiography Just for Fun: The Story of an Extraordinary Revolutionary .

I cannot fully explain my love for programming, but I will try. For programmers, coding is the most fascinating activity in the world—more complex than chess, allowing you to set your own rules, with outcomes determined by what you create.

From the outside, it may seem the most boring thing on Earth. The initial excitement of programming comes from telling a computer to do something and having it obey perfectly, forever, without complaint.

However, blind obedience, while attractive at first, does not make a likable companion. Programming is compelling because, although you can make a computer follow your wishes, you must figure out how to do it.

I see many parallels between computer science and physics: both study how the world works at a fundamental level. Physics explains how the world is built; computer science lets you create worlds. Within a computer, you are the creator, able to control everything, even becoming a god in a limited sense.

This may offend half the planet, but it is true: you can create your own world, limited only by the machine’s capabilities and, increasingly, by your own abilities.

Imagine a treehouse. You can build a functional, sturdy treehouse, but there is a difference between a merely solid structure and an aesthetically pleasing one that fully utilizes the tree—a blend of art and engineering. This is why programming is endlessly captivating; functionality often outweighs fun, beauty, or shock value.

This is an exercise in creativity.

The initial attraction to programming was the desire to understand how computers work. One of the greatest joys is realizing that computers, like mathematics, let you build your own world with its own rules. In physics, you are constrained by existing rules; in mathematics—and programming—you can create any self‑consistent system.

People are fascinated by computers because they let you experience a newly created world and explore its possibilities.

In mathematics you can do "mental gymnastics" and imagine possibilities. Most people think of Euclidean geometry, but computers let you visualize non‑Euclidean shapes. Remember the Mandelbrot set? Its fractal images were impossible to visualize before computers. Though the rules are arbitrary, they produce mesmerizing patterns, showing how programming can create beautiful new worlds.

Most of the time, however, we write programs to solve specific tasks rather than create new worlds. Solving problems requires thoughtful insight, and only a certain type of person can sit at a computer, stare at the screen, and see through the problem.

Operating systems are the foundation of all other functions in a machine, and building an OS is the ultimate challenge—it is like drafting a constitution for the land you create, defining which behaviors are allowed.

Sometimes the law itself seems unreasonable, but reason is what you pursue. You want to examine solutions and recognize that you have found the correct answer in the right way.

Recall the student who always answered correctly because they thought in the right way without trying to learn the method. In computer science, you can solve problems by brute force or by finding the elegant solution that makes the problem disappear.

A classic example comes from mathematics: the great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who as a schoolboy quickly summed the numbers 1 to 100 by pairing them to 101, arriving at 5050 in minutes—a demonstration of insight over brute calculation. Similarly, great programmers can devise elegant solutions without exhaustive computation.

Author: Linus Torvalds Source: Just for Fun: The Story of an Extraordinary Revolutionary (HarperCollins) URL: https://www.brynmawr.edu/inside/academic-information/departments-programs/computer-science/beauty-programming