From Slate:
Coder’s High
These days I write more than I code, but one of the things I miss about programming is the coder’s high: those times when, for hours on end, I would lock my vision straight at the computer screen, trance out, and become a human-machine hybrid zipping through the virtual architecture that my co-workers and I were building. Hunger, thirst, sleepiness, and even pain all faded away while I was staring at the screen, thinking and typing, until I’d reach the point of exhaustion and it would come crashing down on me.
It was good for me, too. Coding had a smoothing, calming effect on my psyche, what I imagine meditation does to you if you master it. In his study Zen and the Brain, neuroscientist James H. Austin speaks of how one’s attention will shift into “a vacancy of utmost clarity, a space so devoid of the physical self.” I don’t know if programmers get all the way there, but their ability to tune out the world while working is remarkable.
I did a lot of programming when I was first getting into computers - assembly on the 6800, 6502, (no operating system) 8080, Z-80 (CP/M) and then onto the IBM and clones (MS-DOS). Stopped programming when Windows came out - initial programming environments were not conducive to development and I was making a lot more money selling the hardware. A bit more:
There are coders who can inhabit this trance for a dozen or more hours at a stretch. I never had that level of stamina, but there are countless stories like the one about game programmer John Harris, who was immortalized in Steven Levy’s myth-making 1984 book Hackers. While working on an 8-bit Atari port of Frogger in the early 1980s, Harris said, “I glued my hands to the keyboard.” One day he started programming midafternoon, losing himself in work. The next time he looked up from the screen, he was surprised that it was still light out, since he thought he’d been working well into the evening. It was actually the next morning.
Been there, done that, got the tee shirt...
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