u/Aaron-Speedy

Programming is extremely creative. You are met with constraints, and you have to solve for those constraints. But it's less constrained than math research, and it's not too mentally taxing, often being methodical. So there's a balance.

The process of programming is having a problem, breaking it down into concrete steps, writing code to solve those concrete steps, and in so doing writing abstractions in the form of functions and structures, which creates a "language" fit for your domain.

In the aspects I articulated, or any other aspects that are similar in spirit to them, are other fields similar? Note that I'm not asking about superficial things like being related to technology. Rather, I mean connections in this deep, philosophical way. For instance, while cybersecurity is related to software engineering in the sense that both fields work with software, cybersecurity is pretty different from software engineering in that it's less about building things and more about analyzing things (though, in the process of analysis, you occasionally build tools).

A good example is Factorio.