The term may not technically mean the above however the implication is there.
i don't think that's an unfair implication. There is plenty of programming that has no creative aspect, and i'd say the majority of programmers are not creatives. It's a term with a well-accepted industry definition, and if you start defining it as broadly as you want to you could probably apply it to just about any job, anywhere in the world. The guy wiring up power poles outside my office does his own thinking, does that make his job creative?
And yes, I am saying that the label of creative can be applied to any job in the world. Watch the video.
we will have to disagree there. which is fine.
> if you start defining it as broadly as you want to you could probably apply it to just about any job, anywhere in the world. The guy wiring up power poles outside my office does his own thinking, does that make his job creative?
Which is my point. I am not saying all programmers to should be called "creative." However, calling a portion of them creative is inaccurate. It also doesn't really get at what OP wanted to get at which is: A programmer with visual arts training/skills.
Ad Agencies/VFX Companies/Design Firms tend to have a "Creative Director" [2] where a Creative Coder would report to and up until recently, their roles would not exist in traditional consumer/enterprise web companies.
Put another way, it's still blurry if someone in such a role would report to an Engineering Director or a Creative Director at a company that had both groups.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=ad+agency+org+structure [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_director
The pedigree of the term creative makes sense in the advertising world. At first creatives did visual and textual work and there were no engineers. Then developers became a part of advertising agencies and became a different department from "creative." Now the walls are being broken down and we're evangelizing "creative coders" Instead of perpetuating this silly distinction, let's do away with it and stop implying that just because someone isn't A "creative" that they aren't creative.
Bad naming is bad naming.
Fine, probably you are. But creative coders in the context of this article do slightly different tasks and their job requires a different mindset, than conventional software engineering. I know, I do both.
I also find it funny when people start arguing on the meanings of the word "hacker". Obviously it has to mean what I do, (otherwise I would loose my cool).
Except when a potential investor is comparing a "Software Architect" to "just a hacker", in which case I am obviously the first one.
Stop being jealous, and define yourself with acts, instead of words. No one will argue with that.
"Creative" is still a bad name. When your application evolves and the names of your services no longer match their business purposes, it's a good practice to update the naming to increase clarity. The same should be true of your departments and job descriptions.
Keeping a name even though it doesn't make sense just because it's traditional and an industry standard is pretty lame. I doubt you'd find much support for that kind of thinking here.
When programming websites, for instance, the scope of the problem is well defined and the programmer's task is to select from an array of known solutions and integrate them into a system that is robust, secure, responsive, scalable, elegant, etc. This is an inherently "creative" task – every programmer solves the problem in a new way – but the emphasis is on robustness, elegance, etc. and not on the idea.
On the flip side, creative programmers are not expected to create especially robust software. They often write software for a single event (often just a demo) on a single platform and poor software quality is regularly tolerated.
All that said, I think the term "experimental" is infinitely more appropriate. Unfortunately "creative" has become an industry term and we'll have to wait a generation for it to go way.
And these thinking techniques can very easily be applied to programming. If you haven't watched the John Cleese lecture I linked to, then I would highly recommend it.