Yeah, but you see the problem with both of those is that they have challenges! How can I build a good UI testing framework? How can I turn this large mass of

Yeah, but you see the problem with both of those is that they have challenges! How can I build a good UI testing framework? How can I turn this large mass of spaghetti into usable code? These are exactly the sorts of things that are good challenges for a programmer. To give a real-life example, I was handed a project last week to create a new project - the source code mostly existed, except some glue, but I needed a new build environment. Now, I could have passed a very boring week manually creating makefiles, or I could do what I actually did - create an optimised makefile format, then write a parser for it in Ruby. The actual generation of the build environment ended up taking about half a day, with the parser/semantics analysis taking up the rest of the time. It was fun work, and better yet, the next time someone asks me to do this, I'll just grab the tool that I developed this time, and it'll all be done in half a day. As an added bonus I got to play with a PEG parser generator for the first time in my life (way nicer than your typical yacc-style ambiguous grammar - thanks Chomsky, you bastard!)