I'm not going to get into the fake programmer vs real programmer thing, but I will mention the thing that most excites me about programming. For the the author

I'm not going to get into the fake programmer vs real programmer thing, but I will mention the thing that most excites me about programming. For the the author it was "design," and for me it's similar: communication. I love being able to take a fuzzy idea, decompose it into discrete (and concrete parts) and then transposing that idea into programming language in such a way that not only solves the problem, but also communicates clearly what the original intent/idea/solution is.