A Programmer's Loss of a Social Identity

I enjoy programming computers because they function on a set of precise and rigid rules. This creates a kind of fantasy world where you can gain wizard-like powers as you accumulate knowledge. Yes, programming is hard and it can be exasperating, but that makes the eventual accomplishment of mastering the skill all the sweeter. Over time, you gain fluency and dexterity as a programmer. It feels good.

Which is to say that the pleasure I get from programming is mostly about learning the underlying truths about computation and applying what I’ve learned. Always improving the craft. This, to me, is the practice of programming.

As the saying goes, the more you learn, the more you realize how much there is still to learn. I’ve spent countless hours over the last 30 years reading about, thinking about, and practicing the art, hobby, occupation, and discipline of programming computers. If only by volume, it’s a big part of who I am.

This is why I love development.

We value learning. We value the merits of language design, type systems, software maintenance, levels of abstraction, and yeah, if I’m honest, minute syntactical differences, the color of the bike shed, and the best way to get that perfectly smooth shave on a yak. I’m not sure what we’re called now, "heirloom programmers"?

Do I sound like a machine code programmer in the 1950s refusing to learn structured programming and compiled languages? I reject that comparison. I love a beautiful abstraction just as much as I love a good low-level trick.

If the problem is that we’ve painted our development environments into a corner that requires tons of boilerplate, then that is the problem. We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.