Huge mob of people talking about a (very good) game as literally, or at least analogous to, programming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24155609. It's heartening to see this get so much attention, since my own FoC R&D is motivated by: real programming should look like this and be this joyful.

Fun. I could see that being combined with hypercard's idea of levels - 1. level 1, just show a form or whatever the user typically sees 2. show information moving around, combining to become a payload 3. see as data goes through the browser to become a network http request, headers etc 4. see as data lands on the server, moves through ingress and gateways, to land in a db and back out through API - a combined view of all inbounds and outbounds 5. see the performance load everywhere, I/O, bottlenecks

One of the things I think the best programmers are able to do is either find interest in or make themselves interested in the problem at hand through various framing techniques or other changes to the problem. Because interest increase attention, energy and the potential for flow state, your output on an interesting project is vastly improved.

And they do that despite programming being riddled with things that sap interest, attention, energy, and potential — things that we can and should remove or replace :)

Professional programmers (who also tend to make programming languages and tools), have a fixation with making programming feel like serious work

The education market has this exact same dilemma — some people (especially the ones paying for it) tend to have an aversion to the idea of "play", which, of course, runs entirely counter to all the research about how people think and learn and socialize productively and fulfill themselves and become actualized and have breakthroughs.

Actually, this was brought up before but there is a strong argument that education does not have to be fun.

Fun shouldn't be a goal — it should be a consequence of something stimulating (whether driven extrinsically, like instruction, or intrinsically, like self-discovery — either of which can be effected by play) in the absence of _needless_ frustration.

Wow I'm surprised to see you link to Factorio! The kind of flow state that game induces is exactly what I want programming to feel like (post requirements analysis). Factorio provides a visceral feeling of progress. You're able to see how every addition you make affects your system, you're able to assess its internals, and you're able to make a plan for your next step, and execute it straightforwardly.

@Nick Smith OO access chains feel a lot like conveyor belts to me.

Ok yes, you're right... certain code patterns (data shuffling) feel like conveyer belts. I think when I made that comment, I was thinking about my own language design 😇. I see data shuffling as boilerplate. I guess that's true in Factorio too: the real goal is specifying connections between machines, and the belts are just a means to an end! Though optimizing the boilerplate is precisely what makes Factorio addictive. Maybe that's why our programming languages have turned out the way they have 😅

It is true that less boilerplate makes for less rhythm and routine in programming. The hard part ends up has a higher percentage of the activity.