You hit the nail on the head with 'fun' - I used to pity the programmers I worked with who didn't have a computer at home (believe me - there were many) - as they saw their jobs as simply that, rather than as an excuse to play on nice machines at their company's expense.

The very first thing I ever saw on a computer was a game - 'moonlander' on a {I really can't remember - I was 10, but an old mainframe of some description} using a teletype - I had the printout of my 1st succesful landing on my bedroom wall until it disintegrated. At that moment, 'computer' and 'game' became inextricably linked in my mind. As I progressed in my gameplaying, I enjoyed the 'meta' aspects more - sussing how games worked, and what skills were necessary to get better at them.

I eventually realised that 'solving' a game was a part of what was really fun for me - puzzles. Crosswords, bridge hands, backgammon positions, Day Of The Tentacle clues - all excuses to exercise the little grey cells. When I started programming, I quickly realised that this was the ultimate puzzle-solving device - you could take *any* real-world situation, express it in the means of your choosing (I started with ASM, and landed up eventually in perl - just getting lazier as I get older I suppose :) ) and then solve it. In fact the whole process was one of puzzles within puzzles - every line of code can be turned into a little problem in itself: "how can this be done neater / smaller / prettier?". Lovely.

To sum up, (and indeed, stop ranting and answer the bl**** question) I think that computer work is fun because it enables me to program. Perl is fun because it allows me to write those programs quicker, and with a greater degree of elegance and beauty than other languages (though if I were stuck on a desert island with nothing but a C compiler, I'd not worry too much). And finally, programming is fun because ...ermmmm...to paraphrase Woody Allen, it's solving puzzles with someone I love :)

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Ben.