footpad makes an interesting point learning all that is to be learned can be both joyful and depressing.

Over the years I have found less and less frustration dealing with the programming languages and more and more frustration with the problem spaces I am asked to solve. In other words I find the tools joyful and but the process of creating successful solutions sometimes depressing.

The most common frustration is dealing with integration. I take my tool (perl), build a solution, test it outside its intedended operations environment then when I try integrate I find other thingies my solution expects to interact don't work the way I thought they did.

Example

1. Inspired by Simon Cozens article on Mail filtering (tpj #18 summer 2000). I decide to replace my old .procmailrc with a nice new perl script.
2. With Mail::Audit pm in hand I create the perfect filter. I test it JOY!
3. But when I install it I find that a recent sendmail upgrade has changed the rule to the game.
4. Hours spent searching through sendmail docs to find the answer

NOTE: The above problem was solved and requires no further comments

Well thats the the joy and sadness of an old fart coder try to make his way in a new age.

Subtlety can sometimes be like facing a fast train on a short track!

<a href://www.georgian.net/~mitd">Mitd -- Made in the Dark 'grey appears to be my favourite colour'