| only weirdos love programming That's overstating it a bit. Despite the fact that I like food, music, art, sex, sports, and adventure more than I like programming, programming would still be one of my favorite hobbies. I say would be because now it is a profession and when I leave work I don't want to touch a computer. But the programming I like is the open source work I do between jobs, that kind of beautiful code I create for free. And in small doses. The large code bases that must ship on time, that's work that I would not do unless I get paid. Now people that code all day at work, and then code a lot more at home and over the weekend, almost every weekend, purely for the love of coding, those might be a bit odd. But not odder than any obsessive hobby, which can just as easily be sports or food. I think the oddness here is just the obsessiveness. |
Is it? How many people, do you think, love programming but are instead do something else? Probably fewer than program but don't love it, given what the financial incentives have been for a while now. Most people, by far, are not programmers. How rare does something have to be for it to make you a "weirdo"?