> Walk up behind an accountant or a web designer sketching out banner ads, and nine times out of ten they’ll know you’re coming from a mile away. But computer programmers aren’t like that. You can stand right behind a programmer for ten minutes and quite often they will not even know you are there–especially when they are working on a difficult section.
Getting lost in your work is not a phenomenon specific to programming.
It does lend itself quite well to this type of focus, however I fully agree that this isn't unique to programming. I suspect the need for "flow", or zen, or deep-concentration of what-have-you is driven by the nature of the task, which involves juggling & visualizing several layers of fairly complex abstraction and rule sets.
I wish he would have stopped short of needing to essentially diminish other occupations. I'm not an accountant, but it wouldn't surprise me if occasionally they too fall into the "zone". Why wouldn't they? Auditing a large and complex system could easily require as much mental agility as coding a piece of software.
Getting lost in your work is not a phenomenon specific to programming.