For me it is the challenge and mental exercise of creating something from thin air which is both elegant and succinct (somewhere between code golf and SICP). I

For me it is the challenge and mental exercise of creating something from thin air which is both elegant and succinct (somewhere between code golf and SICP). I love coming across domains/problems/ideas which truly have not been solved/solved best and conjecturing ways to approach it. Something about that just makes me feel ALIVE and excited - like keeps me up at night and dreaming in syntax excited. One of my latest projects has been simply an sql -> awk (and other unix tools) parser so I can use sql instead of native awk imperative programming. It took me all of an hour to whip the perl script together but when it was working with inner joins on flat files I was like "woah sweet!". http://aql.googlecode.com http://aql.googlecode.com