"To my knowledge, no child grows up “playing doctor” and still believes as a teenager (or even as a college student) that an actual medical practice resembles t

"To my knowledge, no child grows up “playing doctor” and still believes as a teenager (or even as a college student) that an actual medical practice resembles that activity. Likewise, no one has a fully functional toy legal system to play with as a child, and as a result goes into law. On the other hand, “adult” programming, seen from afar, is enough like child-programming to set the computer-enthusiast child up for just this kind of exceptionally cruel bait-and-switch." No, but they do see things like "House MD", "ER","The practice" etc... , which resembles the actual medical or legal profession as much as movie "hacking" resembles computer programming. Besides, I've never known a child to actually see "adult" programming - unless one of your parents is working from home, most "adult" programming happens in a corporate setting. In the same way I've never known a child to see "adult" psychology, or other professions which are practiced in closed environments. "Virtually every profession has a concept of professional equipment" True, but so do programmers. The idea that professional equipment has to be hardware (or for that matter a keyboard) is rather false. Professional writers use the same hardware as amateur writers - pen, paper, computer . But they might have better word processing software. And I'm not sure about others, but the hardware I use for programming is much different then what an amateur computer user might have- a lot more memory (to run those IDEs, databases, memory cache etc...) , two or more screens , and software that are unlikely to be used by non professionals (Jetbrains IDE, Beyond compare, virtual machines) etc.. Also - there are keyboards designed for faster typing, from my experience they just not very useful (programming rarely requires fast typing in my experience, better googling would be a thousand times more useful).