Ask HN: Where's the fun in programming?

It is kinda like music. Practice can be boring to most. But learning a new piece, and performing it, or composing can be fun. So is music boring? You are asking people to explain why they love music. No matter how much anyone love music, scales can be boring or playing the same piece the 1000th time can be boring. Coding is just an activity, like playing music, your purpose in coding it ultimately determines the fun.

> I just cant imagine someone has fun writing those thousands of lines of code.

What's your idea of fun? Surely in this context fun doesn't mean a beach side party with tanned, topless girls. Writing those thousand lines of code which runs Google is fun in the way that it's:

1) Difficult. Mundane and simple jobs irritate the sharp minds. Challenging yourself is very important in the long run. You think the linux kernel developers can't find higher paying jobs at the so called enterprises where they can be PHBs? Why do you think they don't?

2)Sense of accomplishment. It takes a lot to be at the top and even then it's transient. It takes a lot of work to continue to be there.

> Even more so when the code isnt for a cool new feature but for a mundane fix.

That's contradictory reasoning. Mundane fixes won't be thousand of lines. You are heavily mistaken in what constitutes cool features. If I am the one implementing something, more than about you, it's about how I feel about it. I can bet you didn't notice that Google went cooler with their Caffeine search index. It promises 50% fresher content which is a large feat to accomplish, regardless of whether the consumer notices the coolness.

> I image a lot of programmers at Twitter spend hours writing code just so their site/product can handle all the traffic. How it that fun?

It's fun in all the ways any creative, innovative task can be. It doesn't have an "one size fits all" solution. It requires out of the box thinking, challenging the existing conventions, innovating existing solutions, working on NP complete problems...

At this point of discussion, I am really interested in knowing when you said "programming isn't fun", what notion of yours of fun did programming offend?

The fun is in the parts when you get to be creative.

There's plenty of boilerplate, repetitive, coding work out there. Sometimes, though, you get to wrap yourself around a juicy requirement and solve it, or add extra functionality that no-one asked for but someone will notice one day.

Same with writing - doing the same old client proposal for the 50th time is no fun, but writing a fun new blog post about an awesome discovery can be great. Same with lots of work, I guess.

There are two times when I really love coding - when a user expresses pleasure at using the software, and when a fellow coder expresses pleasure at fixing my stuff. If you build it right, it works on so many levels.

I wish I got to code more, and I dismay constantly at the idea that coding is something to be passed out to the lowest bidder.

So much time spent in meetings, an hour with 10 people discussing how a feature should work, when I know I could have just coded it up in that hour and they would have just said "Yeah, like that".

Coding is engineering, but in an accelerated form. Improve the performance of an engine by 10%, something the user could notice instantly? Hard work, big dollars, lots of resources, hard to deploy to many users. Improve the performance of an application by 10%? You might do it by yourself in 30 minutes. Lots of fun.

I like the feeling when a script executes and does what would take me 10 hours to do, in 2 seconds.

For a web application, the code might make the entire thing operate, but it never affects the user the way the design or interface does.

Without the back end the site wont do anything... therefor your "design" is useless...