Programming or Creating - Which Is My Passion?

I found a very interesting question on Programmers (a Stack Exchange Q&A site):

Is programming your passion or is creating your passion?

This made me think. Here’s my answer:

For me, creating and programming/coding exchange the roles of passion and medium. Let me elaborate that a bit. I have 2 things that get me going - an idea for a project or a puzzle. Puzzles are pure coding challenges for me and while I usually feel intrigued by them, most of the time I get a guilty feeling of procrastination. I’m talking here about coding puzzle like Pex4Fun where the only thing you get from solving a puzzle is self-confirmation. If I start with an idea coding is my medium to release the creative energy that has built up inside of me while playing around with the idea in my head. I’m not one of those programmers who just write code to create and say they’re done when the application has all the functionality they envisioned. No, I also want to make my code pretty, clean with lots of cleverness in it. I hate spaghetti code and I love refactoring. I also love code architecture and patterns. This is where creativity becomes a medium to my coding passion. This is also where puzzles come in. As I said, I love solving puzzles and this time I don’t feel like I’m procrastinating. When I feel happy about the code I start implementing new parts of the idea and here the roles changes again. I get the feeling of completion when I feel happy both about the product and the code behind it.