I don't really get this stuff. Building stuff that's considered to be hard are actually the things I learned when starting out with programming. Things like a d

I don't really get this stuff. Building stuff that's considered to be hard are actually the things I learned when starting out with programming. Things like a driver, a boot loader, a compiler aren't things that are harder than any other piece of software. Of course everything gets hard when you go beyond the basic stuff, but I never got why people that program in C++ or Java (usually) tend to be so arrogant when it comes to these things. Assembly isn't hard and building an interpreter or compiler also is pretty simple. The thing that's really hard when programming is the "maintenance" stuff. Be it a web application, an operating system kernel, a compiler, video game or an IRC client. Implementing the feature itself usually isn't that hard. Fixing bug is, finding the right balance between performance and simplicity is too. Oh and progressing without breaking API or ABI compatibility. It usually not important what paradigm you follow. I myself like languages like Perl, where I can choose what way I want to go. Also functional programming languages like Haskell are awesome for building interpreters, but really I consider Assembly to probably be the easiest language there is and everything should start with it, especially C or C++ programmers, because it will prevent you from making assumptions that are wrong and prevent stupid code. Also looking at different languages is fun and everything that is considered hard is usually lots of fun. Haskell and Assembly are the best examples. About research. If you don't do the same thing over and over it's always a way of researching things. Most people building awesome stuff are people connecting things that haven't been connected by now. What I want to say in short is that I don't see how these "levels" can ever fit to anyone. Also I don't get what paradigms and well, everything thing listed fits the term "level". It's about what I thought when I had even less of an idea of what programming is about. I am still exploring stuff and am a complete beginner. I never had a serious project. I just hack (as in writing bad code) some scripts together. Disclaimer: I know I am a bad programmer, if you can even call me one at all. I have a very idealistic view on things.