I bet the pleasure in finding a new way of looking at a problem or a solution, applying an old solution in a novel way to a new problem, or learning to understa

I bet the pleasure in finding a new way of looking at a problem or a solution, applying an old solution in a novel way to a new problem, or learning to understand new concepts - recursion, tail-call-optimization, metaprogramming, (or whatever cool thing your next language does) - is neurologically similar to what happens when we "get" a joke. New paths are traversed in your brain and you giggle like you did when you first figured out how to put two lego bricks together. For me, anyway, programming is just a grown-up version of playing with lego. It's true though that in a corporate context, you are dealing with other people's bugs, policies, procedures, documentation, specifications. Most of that isn't programming, even though non-programmers can't always tell the difference. Even after an attack of debugging, when I've figured out what the problem was, and reconstructed the thought process that led to the code that led to the bug, there's a spark of delight when my brain creates this structure. The debugging may be joyless, but not the fixing.