> I was angry at having such a small error cause me so much grief. After having that experience, any reasonable person would say, "This is crazy. I'm going to d

> I was angry at having such a small error cause me so much grief. After having that experience, any reasonable person would say, "This is crazy. I'm going to do something else with my life." Many of my classmates did say that. But when does this grief stop? A few months back I had the task of implementing the receiving end of what was basically a single-sign-on scheme. I had to use SAML. If you don't know that that is, consider yourself lucky -- or, just google "I hate SAML." That was one of the early hits I found when I first began researching the subject. In the end, the implementation wasn't all that difficult. But the documentation was another story. The overview documents were buzzword bingo; the spec was an exercise in tedium; the libraries were poorly documented; the mailing lists were horrible. The complaining of people on the Internet about all this was demoralizing. When I finally figured it out and got it working, I felt like the payoff was poor compensation. It was just too much frustration for what I accomplished. Programming has its share of this kind of frustration. (So does systems administration.) Just taking your average manpage as an example, we work in an industry where people have no capacity to explain anything to someone who doesn't already understand. A programmer needs inquisitiveness, yes; but that inquisitiveness needs to be steeled by an unreasonable amount of grit. If programming were full of nothing but the fun of for-loops, it would be for everyone. As it is though, I perfectly understand why many otherwise smart and capable people choose to do something else. I love Python; but maybe using it as an introductory language -- in college, no less -- is a little bit like luring children with candy.