I started learning to program in 1976, and in the 1980's I was one of those young, single guys who stayed up all night and wrote C for 14 hours a day. But it wa

I started learning to program in 1976, and in the 1980's I was one of those young, single guys who stayed up all night and wrote C for 14 hours a day. But it was never a _job_ when I did that. It was a hobby. The whole area of interest was new and not that many people were getting paid to write code. It was entirely a different era, but somehow this notion that real programmers code until they drop has hung on through the evolution of the art into an commercial trade craft. There are times when it may make sense to throw that much energy into a project, but those times are exceptional, and to consider it a regular feature of the practice is absurd and serves interests that do not have the practitioner's welfare at heart.