Marcelo Calbucci, writing on the Jackson Fish Market blog, has some wonderful comments about software and creativity:

"I realized that making software is the modern medium for creativity. Books, music, tv, movies, painting, sculpture and all the rest are still as great as they always have been. But software is new and still forming. We have just scratched the surface of what software is capable of. Software is a canvas with incredible possibility. I believe software can tell a story. And coolest of all, software makes just about every other form of self-expression… better. It’s software that will make it possible for me to make a movie. And I feel fortunate that I get to make software at this moment in time."

Heart warming thoughts - but those toiling away in the obscurity of overblown-accounting-app version 27 may not share his same sense of romance. For those of us that are trying to build a destiny of our own design it is because we are pursuing these highfalutin, perhaps even naive, expectations of what software can be. We've left the safe harbor because we're searching for something more than toiling on the Spanish language adaptation of a Cobol based banking application. Somebody has got to do that. It's not sexy. Nobody writes flowery prose about that tedium. But those developers, the vast majority of code-slingers, are those that truly deserve praise.

Sure, Columbus got all the glory. But there were sure a heck of a lot more people left on the docks that made the voyage possible.