I’ve wondered about this. I was keenly interested in programming as a kid, but I was never into hardware or operating systems. I wanted to write text based d&

I’ve wondered about this. I was keenly interested in programming as a kid, but I was never into hardware or operating systems. I wanted to write text based d&d style games, as well as simulate outcomes from dice games like risk (or know the odds of one character defeating a monster). Those are real programs, but looking back, I actually do think this might contain a seed of why I never did become as strong a programmer as my peers from those days. I floated away fr programming, got into writing and music, floated back in. Some of my peers from those days couldn’t take their eyes off computers, it was a deep fascination. There are lots of good ways to be a programmer. But the real experts do seem to have a deeper fascination with the inner core, the hardware, machine code, actual design of programming languages (debates about ruby vs python or similar almost always go beyond my depth, I just like how ruby looks on the page. I just like how quickly I can get my answer in python).