As someone who prefers toy problems to real problems I'll tell you why: toy problems are distilled down to the algorithm or the "interesting" parts. Whereas rea

As someone who prefers toy problems to real problems I'll tell you why: toy problems are distilled down to the algorithm or the "interesting" parts. Whereas real problems the cruft to "interesting" ratio is severely out of whack. As someone who used to love programming but is entirely bored of it now, its because to get the interesting part of most real world problems you have to wade through a mountain of cruft: piles and piles of APIs that have nothing interesting about them but are necessary to do anything at all. I think the difference can be boiled down to the fact that there are two types of programmers: those who mainly enjoy solving problems and those who mainly enjoy building useful things. If the enjoyment is from the problem solving then real world concerns just get in the way.