Didn't xkcd do a graph of alcohol consumption vs code output? Alcohol isn't really my thing wrt drugs (I like the taste but don't prefer the effects) so it doesn't much work for me, but talking with friends, it seems to be a popular enough thing to do that there must be at least a little basis in fact (obviously anecdotal too). I know I used to better at thinking about the best way to approach something under some influence - but that's not when you want to try to debug stuff (friends who drink and code agree with that too). Wrt the thrill of making something work - I dig that. OTOH, if I didn't have to write code to see stuff get done, I probably wouldn't (or might switch to something that is just for fun like smalltalk or make joke projects like cobol on cogs - which is actually kinda cool). On Mar 22, 2017 18:44, "Nick Downing" <downing.nick(a)gmail.com> wrote: Programming is actually an addiction. What makes it addictive to a certain type of personality is that little rush of satisfaction when you try your code and it *works*... and while this is still true to an extent of batch systems from the 50s and 60s it was the interactive systems of the 70s onwards that really spurred the development of the hacker subculture. It was not just the convenience and productivity improvements but that the 'hit' was coming harder and faster. This theory is well known to those who design slot machines and other forms of gambling, it is called the theory of occasional rewards. With this in mind, frequent long debugging sessions do not make the process any less addictive, indeed MORE addictive since the occasional rewards are less predictable etc. With this in mind it is unsurprising that programmers tend to have other fixes too such as coffee, harder drugs or even gambling. Some personalities seem to be quite susceptible to occasional-rewards things. Nick On Mar 23, 2017 4:49 AM, "Noel Chiappa" <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:

On 22 Mar 2017, at 22:35, Nick Downing <downing.nick(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think this is completely right, and is the reason that really interactive / resident environments can be so catastrophically addictive. Even on a fairly slow machine it doesn't take more than a second or so to compile a single function, and the whole edit/save/compile/link/debug cycle becomes compressed to edit/compile-one-function/debug, with cycle times of a few seconds. I have quite seriously lost a year of my life this way, although I am reasonably sure that part of the problem is that the Xerox d-machines were actually made by the Fair Folk and using them for any length of time results in the standard issues associated with dealing with artifacts of the Fay.