The Pleasure of Pain

I would've titled this "The King of Pain" (after one of The Police's greats) but I figured I should restrict myself in the use of superlatives. I already have a reputation of exaggerating trivia.

No, I'm not talking about physically torturing myself, or being addicted to drugs or the likes. I'm talking about the curse of programming. Twice, I've been reminded of the code bases I've worked on in the past. I don't really miss any of the vocabulary or grammar of those languages, i.e. I'm won't be bursting out in poetry in C++. I do, however, remember the hours spent banging my head against the keyboard in solitary confusion as to why the editions in the thousands or millions of lines of code (depending on who wrote it) didn't produce the desired results or, better still, crashed the execution. After days of debugging, did the mystery unfold itself, only to provide fleeting relief before the next problem arose and smiled gleefully at my misery. For about 10 years, I was in perpetual pain, the sort you get used to and then can't live without.

Today, the world is populated with code jockeys. Those who'll write the next billion/trillion or however many lines of code to ultimately make everything around us intelligent. Nothing against them, they'll be the ones pushing us in this millennium. It's just a life philosophy I see, in me and those around, to find comfort in pain and in the false hope that tomorrow will be better.