[georgieporgie]

Your comment reminds me of the Charles Petzold essay on getting away from the IDE, which is summarized fairly nicely in this Coding Horror post: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/10/the-cognitive-style...

Personally, I think that attaining the state of flow is what makes programming enjoyable, and I haven't experienced it in many years. There are just too many APIs, too much poor documentation, too many bugs, and too many languages I have to switch between for me to ever get into the 'zone'.

[hackinthebochs]

Absolutely! I totally miss this from my college days. Being able to crank out a project from start to finish the day its due: being in the zone for many hours straight. You could hold the entire set of necessary APIs in your head at once so there was nothing separating your ideas from the editor. It's an experience of pure creation that you simply will never achieve these days, except for very short bursts.

I cope by taking every chance I get in my day job to experience these short bursts of pure creation. Do I need an interesting algorithm implemented? I'll hand code it myself rather than spend an hour or so trying to find and shoehorn the "standard" implementation into my application. I love the rare occasions where I notice a, dare I say, "clever" solution* to a problem. Coming up with and implementing these cases are a joy. I admit this isn't always the best way to solve a problem from a "software engineering" standpoint. But it keeps me in the game.

*Not clever as in obscure, WTF worthy; but clever as in elegant and expressive, albeit perhaps inaccessible to less skilled coders.