Tim Bray: "Somewhat to my surprise, while in Math I worked like a dog and got B's and C's, I sailed through the CS courses and got high A's and didn’t notice I was working hard because I was having fun.". That reminds me of my own story. I was at the University of North Texas, majoring in Jazz Studies, with a concentration on Bass (electric & upright). If you don't know, UNT is one of the top music schools in the country, and I didn't start college until I was 22, so I was humbled pretty quickly by 18 and 19 year olds. So my freshman year was spent in the practice rooms, trying to learn piano, trying to catch up with the pack. By the summer, I was getting sharp pains in my forearms and was pretty depressed about my future - if this was the competition, I was going to starve. I took my first real programming course the following spring semester and it was a huge revelation. Staying up all night in the practice room was work, but staying up all night in the computer lab was fun. And I realized pretty quickly that most of my classmates didn't think that. I'll never forget talking to someone halfway through the semester who told me he wrote an assignement without using any while loops because he couldn't understand them.

The funny thing now is that computers really aren't fun anymore. I think I've had it beaten out of me, I've spent too many nights and weekends chasing down stupid quirks, stuff that's not even programming, just accounting and janitorial stuff. I still read programming books in my free time, but most books just depress me. That thought occurred to me while reading one of the Agile process books, so I quit reading about process and started trying to find things that would take me back 12 years, back to when Pascal was neat, and everything seemed easy.

The title comes from Mark Watson whose online book Loving Lisp also uses that expression. That's one of the books I'd like to read, the little bit I've seen looks good.