[hintymad]

> Which is to say that the pleasure I get from programming is mostly about > learning the underlying truths about computation and applying what I’ve > learned. Always improving the craft. This, to me, is the practice of > programming.

I think the pleasure and the identity is still there. It's just that we need to amp up the game. How many times one can really enjoy writing a binary search or a service that essentially transforms data from one JSON format to another. Fortunately or unfortunately, the huge wave of Internet+Big Data+Cloud+Mobile+Social has been part of our daily life, and what we do day in and day out has become increasingly mundane. As a result, what we implement day in and day out is getting increasingly repetitive -- I think to a certain degree the repetitiveness, when crossing certain threshold, will take away the pleasure of programming and will destroy our identity.