[ChuckMcM]

Absolutely there is more fun to be had. I clearly remember that sort of "ah ha" moment when I figured out that data structures could be computation. That took me from a loop that could not operate fast enough on the data, to one where the data set had some precomputation done on it and the loop only had to 'finish' it for various conditions and was plenty fast. Suddenly large vistas of "wow" open up. The posting from Julia's blog about how computers are really fast, same sort of experience for her. Suddenly a new understanding, the world shifts, and now you have a whole bunch of new insight to throw at problems. We can't help but get better at addressing problems.

I believe it was Leslie but it might have been Butler Lampson who mentioned you could stomp on a bunch of ants and the colony still worked fine. Ants are a great example of a durable distributed system that is robust in the face of massive amounts of damage. When you start thinking about computers like that it makes you realize you can build 100% uptime systems after all. The implementation of that property (individual machines are junk, collectively they are unstoppable) was done really well inside Google's infrastructure. They got to watch it in action when a colo facility they had clusters in caught fire.