--- title: Recreational Programming | daily.dev description: A brief reflective piece asking how many developers originally learned to program for fun rather than money, encouraging readers to rediscover that joy through... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/recreational-programming-zvq8iwafx twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Recreational Programming | daily.dev og:description: A brief reflective piece asking how many developers originally learned to program for fun rather than money, encouraging readers to rediscover that joy through... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/recreational-programming-zvq8iwafx og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/zvq8IwAfX.png og:image:alt: Recreational Programming og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Recreational Programming **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 1 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A brief reflective piece asking how many developers originally learned to program for fun rather than money, encouraging readers to rediscover that joy through small personal experiments, while clarifying the goal isn't to become a different kind of programmer but to keep curiosity alive alongside a career. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 80 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-14). **TL;DR:** Most commenters embrace recreational programming as intrinsically motivated fun, sharing nostalgic origin stories and hobby projects, while a vocal minority debate whether AI has devalued or even killed the appeal of building things just for fun. **Sentiment:** 55% positive · 30% mixed · 15% skeptical **The case for** - Many shared personal nostalgia stories about learning to program purely out of curiosity decades ago. - Several argue AI has supercharged their hobby projects, enabling far more ambitious work in less time. - Some find it liberating to let go of guilt over abandoned side projects, treating the learning itself as the finished product. - Pointers to favorite recreational-programming streamers/creators as inspiration. **The pushback** - Some feel AI has reduced the social value of sharing hobby projects since others assume AI did the work. - A few argue there's no longer any point to building 'useless' things since AI makes it trivial. - Complaints that modern online spaces for sharing nascent hobby work have shrunk or grown hostile. - Some UI/UX complaints about the presentation itself (navigation, contrast, lack of progress indication). **By community** - hackernews (mixed): A large, sprawling thread mixing nostalgic enthusiasm for coding-for-fun with a genuine, unresolved debate over whether AI is killing or supercharging that joy. **Hottest debate:** Whether AI has killed the motivation and social value of recreational programming or instead supercharged it. **Open questions** - Is there a modern equivalent today for the 'weird kid' who used to discover programming alone and for fun? - Will programming-as-a-hobby eventually resemble ham radio, with enthusiasts but few paid jobs? **Highlights** > The definition perfectly describes how I started out in computers in 1981. Brought home a 4K, 8-bit computer from Radio Shack that I could barely afford and hooked it to the TV. Had never touched a computer before, zero prior knowledge and only had the manual in the box (which was surprisingly good). No one I'd ever met owned a computer at home or used one at work and I'd never really considered that you could make money with computers. I just thought the games seemed fun and the idea of learning about programming seemed cool. Turns out typing in long listings from B&W hobbyist zines and then finding all the typos was a fine way to learn. Teaching myself assembler was harder because I had no docs. I was so clueless I actually looked up Motorola in the phone book and called to ask where I could get a manual. The sales rep who answered the phone must have taken pity on me because he mailed the CPU manual for free. I still have the purple reference card and remember the common opcodes by heart (https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Datasheets/M...) The first time I made money was about 18 months later when I wrote a pretty handy disk utility program. Stayed up all Friday night finishing it. Copied onto floppies I sold for $5 at the local user's group Saturday morning. Made $140 and got my first 28 customers. That was enough to get me hooked on making software and selling it. ~40 years, three startups, over a dozen products, hundreds of good people employed, a couple million customers and two PC Magazine Product of the Year awards later - I regret nothing. Started on a lark to learn and have fun. Much was learned, fun was had. Wonderful journey - highly recommend. > — [mrandish on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50081303) > I feel you're missing the point. AI has no impact on recreational programming, it's about satisfying your personal curiousities and interests. I'm currently hand rolling a database project in rust because I find writing rust is fun. If you're pausing to ask yourself "what's the use if you can just use AI" then you may not have liked programming intrinsically to begin with, but instead the second order effects it gave you. > — [scronkfinkle on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50081499) > It somewhat does have an impact on it, because a cool part of recreational programming for SOME people is to share their hobby with others, but the value that others will place on that sharing is diminishing with AI. It's just human nature to value something less or find it less impressive when it can easily be made with a machine. > — [bemtevi on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50081541) > "Recreational Programming" sounds like a legal alternative to "Medical Programming" that you don't need to get a prescription from your doctor to do. I prefer the term "Pleasure Programming", to de-emphasize how addictive it is. >Permission to build useless things. I prefer the term "Ultimate Things", to de-emphasize how useless they are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine >The Italian artist Bruno Munari began building "useless machines" (macchine inutili) in the 1930s. He was a "third generation" Futurist and did not share the first generation's boundless enthusiasm for technology but sought to counter the threats of a world under machine rule by building machines that were artistic and unproductive.[ >The version of the useless machine that became famous in information theory (basically a box with a simple switch which, when turned "on", causes a hand or lever to appear from inside the box that switches the machine "off" before disappearing inside the box again) appears to have been invented by MIT professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, while he was a graduate student at Bell Labs in 1952. Minsky dubbed his invention the "ultimate machine", but this nomenclature did not catch on. The device has also been called the "Leave Me Alone Box". So here's a live demo of an ultimate thing I pleasure programmed: https://hyperties.org/cabinet/ultimate/ What this is: I've been using Claude to recreationally developing a PDP-7 and Type 340 vector graphics display emulator, in order to run an early CAD system called PIXIE, which has the first known radial menus, driven by a light pen, developed at Cambridge in the late 1960's, whose 128 pages of PDP-7 assembly language source code the author Heinz Lemke scanned and sent me. Once I got it working, I told Mitch Bradley about how much I wanted a Forth system for it. Mitch has written useful things like OpenFirmware and CForth, and I was his summer intern at Sun in 1987, where we had a great time hacking his CForth into CADroid (a circuit editing system developed at LucasFilms) as an extension language. https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware https://github.com/MitchBradley/cforth http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/forth.html Since then, Mitch developed his Sun Forth system into OpenFirmware for the boot ROMs of systems like the Sparcstation, PowerPC Mac, and the OLPC. So naturally I thought it would be fun to run Forth on the same machine that ran PIXIE, mainly because I'd love to work together and hack Forth with Mitch again after all these years, but also because Forth was the perfect language for the PDP-7. So then Mitch whipped up a PDP-7 Forth in one day with Claude, with Turtle Graphics! https://github.com/MitchBradley/pdp7forth https://hyperties.org/cabinet/forth/ It turns out that the PDP-7 instruction set is ideal for Forth. It has an "XCT" instruction for indirectly executing other instructions, which makes the Forth inner interpreter loop only require 3 instructions. PDP-7 Forth — Mitch Bradley, 26 September 2026: https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main... PDP-7 Forth, by Mitch Bradley: https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main... Now I'm hacking virtual hardware devices for the PDP-7, and controlling and visualizing them with Forth. First I made an "Ultimate Machine" device for the PDP-7, inspired by Claud Shannon and Marvin Minsky, whose only purpose is to turn itself off! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine Bruno Munari called it a "Useless Machine", but Minsky was more compassionate, and appreciated its purpose of turning itself off as being ultimately useful, so he renamed it the Ultimate Machine. I think there are some deep implications to the halting problem, but I can't quite put my finger on it the way the Ultimate Machine puts its finger on its own off switch. The Ultimate Machine emulator plugs into the PDP-7 emulator as a virtual device cabinet, which has its own device control IO > — [DonHopkins on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082991) > If anything AI super charged it. I'm taking on more and more ambitious projects and am able to make tremendous progress in just a weekend. > — [charcircuit on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50083030) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50079865) · 136 points · 80 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [i'm just having fun](https://daily.dev/posts/i-m-just-having-fun-nhjhbcdd2) · Lobsters · 4 upvotes · 0 comments - [Craft software that makes people feel something — Raphael Amorim](https://daily.dev/posts/craft-software-that-makes-people-feel-something-raphael-amorim-2s3rzolth) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [You had a story](https://daily.dev/posts/you-had-a-story-aluw9sjxe) · Read the Tea Leaves · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/recreational-programming-zvq8iwafx) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Recreational Programming","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/recreational-programming-zvq8iwafx","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/recreational-programming-zvq8iwafx"},"datePublished":"2026-10-14T02:06:30.566Z","dateModified":"2026-10-14T07:04:42.701Z","description":"A brief reflective piece asking how many developers originally learned to program for fun rather than money, encouraging readers to rediscover that joy through...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/49ee0dec6cdd01597574cb7d806278df?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/49ee0dec6cdd01597574cb7d806278df?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/recreational-programming-zvq8iwafx","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"","timeRequired":"PT1M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Recreational Programming"}]} ```