Ah yes, the bitter sting of diving down too far in the API. I remember my first C++ Win32 app, written using Borland's OWL. I made an "hello world" pop up, then started poking around under the hood.
What the hell is all this crap! I spent a day trying to figure it out. Then everytime something went wrong there I was, diving through the same crap all over again.
Or the bitter sting of not diving down far enough. Remember that app where you wrote code all around the barn and farmyard, only to realize that a couple of API calls would have done the same thing? Ooof. That hurts.
As an older programmer (who doesn't code for a living), I enjoy the challenge of finding the right abstraction level and skating into a solution. When I wrote my first COM server, I used an MFC book, a Doc-View type model, and then copied liberally from MSDN. Worked like a charm. It was a lot of work, but rolling that sucker by hand would have been brutal.
And it's gotten even easier. When I wrote http://hn-books.com, I thought "I wonder if I can write a static site that looks like a client-server app?" Compared to all that C++ and COM nastiness, it was a piece of cake. I love creating web art (apps, content, mixed-mode) but shit, it's not even work.
So I picked up FP a couple of years ago. Easy to pick up, difficult to master. Made my entire brain explode. What a great ride.
So no, I don't mind the complex work. In fact, I can't tell you how much I really crave that feeling of "Beats the hell out of me how we're going to do this, let's go do it" No feeling in the the world like that. It's like solving a jigsaw puzzle where you cut and color your own pieces, and there's no picture on the box. Fun stuff. Hope to be doing that kind of stuff when I'm 70.
What the hell is all this crap! I spent a day trying to figure it out. Then everytime something went wrong there I was, diving through the same crap all over again.
Or the bitter sting of not diving down far enough. Remember that app where you wrote code all around the barn and farmyard, only to realize that a couple of API calls would have done the same thing? Ooof. That hurts.
As an older programmer (who doesn't code for a living), I enjoy the challenge of finding the right abstraction level and skating into a solution. When I wrote my first COM server, I used an MFC book, a Doc-View type model, and then copied liberally from MSDN. Worked like a charm. It was a lot of work, but rolling that sucker by hand would have been brutal.
And it's gotten even easier. When I wrote http://hn-books.com, I thought "I wonder if I can write a static site that looks like a client-server app?" Compared to all that C++ and COM nastiness, it was a piece of cake. I love creating web art (apps, content, mixed-mode) but shit, it's not even work.
So I picked up FP a couple of years ago. Easy to pick up, difficult to master. Made my entire brain explode. What a great ride.
So no, I don't mind the complex work. In fact, I can't tell you how much I really crave that feeling of "Beats the hell out of me how we're going to do this, let's go do it" No feeling in the the world like that. It's like solving a jigsaw puzzle where you cut and color your own pieces, and there's no picture on the box. Fun stuff. Hope to be doing that kind of stuff when I'm 70.