I think calling people like the op (and using quotation marks) those who 'love typing special characters into a computer' is a total strawman. I don't think OP is mourning being a typist lol.

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kentm 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

'love typing special characters into a computer' is not just a strawman, its rude and dismissive.

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card_zero 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, they like writing code, in the same way that a blogger likes writing a blog post.

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embedding-shape 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe I took "the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code)" too literally but quite literally, there are people who say this is the joy for them, the entering and writing of code, and shared this point of view on HN before, it wouldn't be the first time somehow said so. Maybe it's you who are being a bit insensitive here, as clearly some people do like that particular activity.

Regardless, I apologize if I misunderstood "writing code", I take that to mean "typing code" as the other stuff we do around is more "problem solving" than anything else, regardless of what the activity is (thinking, designing, troubleshooting, etc).

An interesting HN search for comments with "I love writing code" that has some false-positives, but has programmers stating clearly they like the action of manually typing code: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

	▲	card_zero 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No it doesn't, which comment? None of them say that. Nobody enjoys anything that isn't problem-solving, with debatable exceptions for drugs and hormones. Fun is learning. The learning is either subtle and inexplicit, or partly subtle and inexplicit. You engage with a medium, you interact with the work, you make edits, you learn stuff. If you're shepherding an AI then you do all that on a different level, in a different way, a way that isn't better as such. You're doing a different thing. (Meanwhile, the AI doesn't have any fun.)