Fooling around with a paint brush in your study is fine, but real artist ship.
A bunch of ideas that sound great in theory are just that, it is only by surviving the crucible of the real world that ideas are validated and truly tested. When Guy Steele and James Gosling were the only software developers in the world who could program in Java, every Java program was a masterpiece. It is only once the tool was placed in the hands of mere mortals that its flaws were truly known.
Walk around a good gallery. There are a pretty good number of pieces entitled "Study #3", or something of that sort. An artist is playing around with a tool, or a technique, trying to figure out something new.
Piano music is probably where this concept gets the most attention. Many études, such as those by Chopin, are among the most significant musical works of the era.
In another talk Bret claims that you basically cannot do visual art/design without immediate feedback. I was wondering how he thought people that create metal sculptures via welding, or carve marble, possibly work. It's just trivially wrong to assert you need that immediate feeback, and calls all of the reasoning into question.
Good point. I think programmers would be better off dropping the artistic pretensions altogether and accepting that they are much closer to engineers and architects in their construction of digital sandcastles.
You're forgetting about the hundred even thousands of painting they did that are not in the gallery. These paintings are the same as "shipping" even though you never see them in the gallery.
You can't play around with a tool or technique without actually producing something. You can talk about how a 47.3% incline on the brush gives the optimal result all day long, but it's the artist that actually paints that matters.
Why does that matter?