“It was just a toy. I had always liked building stuff. But one of the problems with building stuff is you need to have parts: wood, wires, switches or stuff like that, and those cost money. Here [with software], you can build arbitrarily complicated things and you didn’t need any physical materials. You needed no money.”

James Gosling, founder of Java, on why he was drawn to programming as featured on Lex Fridman’s pod. Software is the creation of value out of your brain power and time. What other systems require such minimal inputs for such potentially world-changing outputs?