I have always found coding to be oddly comforting in the way that it all, in the end, makes sense.  It is such a straightforward means of communicating with a machine.  You are given rules and regulations, how you can tell it this, how you can tell it that, and then you follow the instructions.  It is the communicative equivalent of baking a cake.  I find something appealing in such a logical formulation of ideas.

That being said, I also find interesting the contrasts that coding language has with the english language, or really any writing language on a broader spectrum.  They start from similar motives in that both are arguably goal-driven.  Whether writing a short story, essay, or program, the author has a direct objective in their crafting of the piece.  Whether you want to elicit some level of emotional response or have a simply program that converts binary to hex, there is a purpose behind the creation.

The difference that I believe stood out the greatest to me was that I did not care about how the coding looked or read in the process.  While Python has some features that require a certain level of organization, as well as allow for comments that the author can use to annotate the process, a lot of the time my main focus was taking the least amount of steps to reach my main goal.  As we read for class, a lot of programmers are paid extremely well to try and simplify and streamline code as much as possible.  It is not about the beauty of the writing, but simply about the speed and accuracy of its results.  This is not to say that there isn’t a great appreciation for beautiful code or a brilliant algorithm, but that those types of compliments are not the end game.