I love experiences folks shared in response to this. Makes me realize that there are many significant factors that influence how people see programming. My own experience for most years has been a combination of the joy of clear/convincing writing with the joy of a high level ergonomic language (Ruby) to express the code. In Ruby and its frameworks, you almost never write boilerplate, so everything is the interesting part. And the surest way to have good understanding of the code is to type it out. (That's why most books ask you to manually type the example code). Figured I'd share my experience too.