Ah, the thing they never tell you when you learn to program... computers are the source of all frustration. I have spent all day editing a backup copy of a fil

Ah, the thing they never tell you when you learn to program... computers are the source of all frustration. I have spent all day editing a backup copy of a file, wondering why nothing I changed fixed the bug. I've spent a whole day chasing a missing character. I've spent a week, under deadline pressure, only to discover a bug in the compiler. I've lost the source code for a whole project because I nuked the directory by accident. I have to reboot my MacBook every two weeks because it starts paging and is so lagged I can out-type it. I did a self-study and found out that I have a 3% error rate in everything I do... and found out that 1/2 of those errors are caused by copy/paste (which I stopped doing). Errors at every level, from typing to syntax to semantics to design to thinking...and every one of them is a source of frustration. I have to laugh when I hear people suggest that we require students to learn to program. Learning to program is the easy part. Dealing with the continuous, painful, and ever-present frustration is the hard part. All day, every day, every year of my 44 years of programming have included creating, fixing, and bleeding over programming and its frustrations. You ask "What do you do to deal with this?"... I guess it is like trying to be a really good musician, you just study, work, and bleed at it. Most people give up on music; most programmers "retire into management". Some of us program because, like a musician, "it is not what we do, it is who we are". We program because we must. Frustration just makes that rare success that much sweeter.