In this paper JoAnne Reid explains why she is confident about the benefits of programming, and uses this opportunity to reflect upon Garth Boomer's influence on her own teaching practice. Reid adds "I think more theoretically about programming in my own situation of practice--teacher education." Using Boomer's own work on programming, along with an understanding of the concept of "aporia," Reid explores why programming is central to teacher learning, and why it matters in teacher education, as novices engage in the process of learning to teach, and develop expertise as a teacher. Reid intimates that Garth Boomer understood curriculum as a process "directed towards promoting valued knowledge, abilities and attitudes in the learner," where what is "valued" "encompasses the world view of both teacher and learner." Boomer's programming model showed that "teaching" is a creative act, and that programming provides the opportunity for rich, classroom-centred professional development in guiding one's own learning. Boomer's approach to programming asks educators to fully understand that teaching is a matter of values-driven intellectual engagement with the content and the classes being taught. Teaching and learning always happens in dialogic, situated, constrained, and less than ideal circumstances, but when it is seen that this impossibility is productive, that learning to teach is a creative process, that successful teaching is not a matter of getting it "right", but of practising, then Reid concludes "I am better able to design pre-service teacher education that can assist pre-service teachers to learn in and from a much richer engagement in the act of programming--in imagination, in theory, and as practice."