Heh. You've got a wonderful way of looking at it. That's actually much the same sort of learning rush I look for in writing code, but it's harder to find now than it was. I wrote my first "hello world" program when my age was in single digits, and the luster seems to have worn off. It takes more to make me grin like an idiot than it used to, and that's actually kind of disappointing. I'd prefer all the simple pleasures in writing code were just as exciting and induced just as much happiness as they ever did.

Unfortunately, there was a break in my involvement with computers of a few years between when I was very young and learning to program and when I was essentially an adult and getting caught up on the changes in technologies. I'm still not much of a programmer, despite starting at such a young age, because I'm missing the education in that field of endeavor that should have existed somewhere in the middle.

I tend to be quite good at the basics and rather awful at putting them together into complex, useful collections of algorithms. I have that early grounding in the basics, but none of the skill that really builds on that in the meantime. I'm working on getting myself back into the swing of things with Perl, which is ideal for this point in my life because of the fact that I regularly do web development work and also admin Linux machines, so of course I hold high hopes for my ability to learn to effectively use Perl in the future.

Now that I've rambled on with a complete non-sequitur, I'll shut up.