I've been programming since my early teens > 25 years ago. The article asks "How can you not be romantic about programming"? And I have to say, that after all t

I've been programming since my early teens > 25 years ago. The article asks "How can you not be romantic about programming"? And I have to say, that after all these years, I am romantic about programming...only sometimes, now. For one, programming a lot made me very near-sighted, and my eyes are dry to the point that I can no longer wear contacts. (I had a bad episode and nearly went blind a couple years back.) That really blows, because I used to like surfing and other outdoor activities that are seriously curtailed by thick glasses. Take care of your eyes! Second, I am mostly not romantic about programming because I feel like I am swimming against the tide most of the time. Stuff changes so fast and so much; there is so much fad and passing fashions, and what's the rage these days is tomorrow's cargo cult. What's today's cargo cult started as an offhand comment with a kernel of truth that far too many people took far too seriously. It's never the right things that change, either. We keep changing syntax and IDEs and environments and frameworks, and yet we're still fighting memory management bugs in 2021. A very stubborn cult of performance worshippers have successfully defended the bottom layers of software from being rewritten in safe languages (putting safety at priority #1 for 4+ decades). I'm willing to pay 15% performance for this layer to just be forever ridden of this, but people treat me like an alien. Third, people have complained about programmers being lazy and wasteful since the beginning of time, but we've truly jumped the shark. Build times for C++ (and Rust) are just insane. To think, dozens of cores, cranking away for minutes at a time, trillions upon trillions upon trillions of calculations just to output a little binary. Being a compiler person, and knowing some details about what is going on inside those compilers makes me want to cry. It's insanely wasteful. Fourth, the arguing. There have been tribes and flamewars and a toxic culture since forever, but really, it feels so hard to express how disappointed I am in the whole shit, without adding to the whole shit and making the whole atmosphere even worse. I vacillate between wanting to yell at clouds and being sick of hearing people yelling at clouds! I'm simultaneously sick of being shouted at and on the edge of being shouting mad! But, there are bright spots. CPUs are insanely fast, and there is memory enough for everything. Stuff crashes less. But yeah, everything is a tangle and huger heap of shit than ever.