duncan wrote:Rebel wrote:Tony P. wrote:Even then, it puzzles me that some people like to have a hobby that reminds them of their jobs. I'd rather have a hobby that's orthogonal to the job, to forget about the job at least for a while.
I can't imagine a programming job that is more creative than chess prgramming.
more than go programming ?
Speaking of, go indeed has deeper strategy and complexity than chess. I guess don't like positional play enough to like go, but in terms of tactics, chess is inferior to shogi. Either go or shogi must be more exciting than traditional chess to almost anyone. To those who'd like to stay within the Western culture, crazyhouse is a more tactical version of chess.
All that said, crazyhouse isn't popular enough yet; shogi is very popular in Japan, but, according to
Larry's instructive experience, it's hard to get into the Japanese market as a foreigner; and as far as go and xiangqi, it's likely hard to get into the Chinese market as a Westerner as well.
As for the philosophy of hobbies in general, I think it's a bit different depending on one's affluence. In a poor country, it's hard to get bored or get too much free time and energy for such a consuming hobby as board game development.
I'm surprised to see a lot of Slav authors here, but it looks like they're primarily programmers. A likely reason is that software development is easy to outsource and gives rise to a lot of freelance jobs, so if a poor country resident learns to program at a level that's enough to write a decent engine, they'll be already good enough to earn more money by freelance coding than they'd earn in almost any non-programming local office job ('in a factory', as Russians jocularly put it).
However, chess coding will then take only a small percentage of their time, while most of it will be spent on more lucrative applications of the programming skills.
I regret it that I'm so bad at debugging, as self-written utility and data analysis scripts would certainly help my productivity. And I'm sure this is the direction where I should be heading if I ever want to learn to code well, even though it's not as artistic as chess (but as I hinted above, for any game / art that you're familiar with, there's almost always some lovelier game / art that you didn't know of).
In particular, I could benefit from forking one particular non-chess Python / SQL project, and Python is too slow to write a chess engine in - it's used to write a bearably working GUI with less effort, but the resulting code is slow.
Generally, I don't like the distinction between a job and a hobby. Somehow I fail to enjoy anything that doesn't make at least a modest profit, maybe because I can't afford to retire yet but dream of retiring asap.
Sorry for the thread, I needed it to make up my mind. Good luck to everyone