TITLE: The Coder's High Beats The Rest
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 23, 2014  3:13 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
At least David Auerbach
<A HREF="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/06/coder_s_high_the_intense_feeling_of_absorption_exclusive_to_programmers.html">
   thinks so</A>.
One of the reasons is that programming has a self-perpetuating
cycle of creation, implementation, repair, and new birth:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 "Coding" isn't just sitting down and churning out code.  There's
 a fair amount of that, but it's complemented by large chunks of
 testing and debugging, where you put your code through its paces
 and see where it breaks, then chase down the clues to figure out
 what went wrong.  Sometimes you spend a long time in one phase
 or another of this cycle, but especially as you near completion,
 the cycle tightens -- and becomes more addictive.  You're
 boosted by the tight feedback cycle of coding, compiling,
 testing, and debugging, and each stage pretty much demands the
 next without delay.  You write a feature, you want to see if it
 works.  You test it, it breaks.  It breaks, you want to fix it.
 You fix it, you want to build the next piece.  And so on, with
 the tantalizing possibility of -- just maybe! -- a perfect piece
 of code gesturing at you in the distance.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

My experience is similar.  I can get lost for hours in code, and
come out tired but mentally energized.  Writing has never given
me that kind of high, but then I've not written a really long
piece of prose in a long time.  Perhaps writing fiction could
give me the sort of high I experience when deep in a program.

What about playing games?  Back in my younger days, I experienced
incredible flow while playing chess for long stretches.  I never
approached master level play, but a good game could still take
my mind to a different level of consciousness.  That high
differed from a coder's high, though, in that it left me tired.
After a three-round day at a chess tournament, all I wanted to do
was sleep.

Getting lost in a computer game gives me a misleading <EM>feeling</EM>
of flow, but it differs from the chess high.  When I come out of
a session lost in most computer games, I feel destroyed.  The
experience doesn't give life the way coding does, or the way
I imagine meditation does.  I just end up feeling tired and used.
Maybe that's what drug addiction feels like.

I was thinking about computer games even before reading Auerbach's
article.  Last week, I was sitting next to one of the more mature
kids in
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2014-06.html#e2014-06-17T14_38_32.htm">
   our summer camp</A>
after he had just spent some time gaming, er, collecting data for
our our study of internet traffic.  We had an exchange that went
something like this:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
<B>Student</B>: I love this feeling.  I'd like to create a game
                like this some day.

<B>Eugene</B>:  You can!

<B>Student</B>: Really?  Where?

<B>Eugene</B>:  Here.  A group of students in my class last month
                wrote a computer game next door.  And it's way
                cooler than playing a game.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I was a little surprised to find that this young high schooler had
no idea that he could learn computer programming at our university.
Or maybe he didn't make the connection between computer games and
computer programs.

In any case, this is one of the best reasons for us CS profs to
get out of their university labs and classrooms and interact with
younger students.  Many of them have no way of knowing what
computer science is, what they can do with computer science, or
what computer science can do for them -- unless we show them!
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