> His story gives some context to how younger developers think. For instance, the kind of small enthusiast projects he was doing (webpages and php) were differe

> His story gives some context to how younger developers think. For instance, the kind of small enthusiast projects he was doing (webpages and php) were different from mine (interpreters or games -- single-computer stuff). For the record, I'm also a "younger developer", only about one year older than OP. I was never particularly interested in the Web or PHP or anything of the sort. What inspired me to become a programmer was primarily Nintendo (NES and later SNES) -- I wanted to make games. As a young child, when asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, I'd tell people that I wanted to "make MegaMan". In my early teens, I became a fan of the Final Fantasy series, and like many others at the time, I enjoyed creating little Japanese-style RPGs. Hearing about some technique called "scripting", I decided to write my own interpreter, and fell in love. Since then, I've been primarily a PL geek with a deep interest in programming languages, compilers, interpreters, and related subjects (such as PL design, PL theory, type theory, etc.). I've also dabbled in operating systems and other low-level systems programming stuff. For whatever reason, I enjoy very low-level programming (as in assembly language, no higher-level than C or Forth) and very high-level programming (as in Lisp, Prolog, ML, Haskell, etc.) -- anything in the middle (Java, for example) leaves me feeling utterly bored.