I've been programming for 36 years, more than 3/4 of my life. It's always a little surprising how much I still absolutely love it. Obviously, the context in which I program can sometimes suck the joy out of it—it's not all roses.
But when I get to sit down and type a bunch of letters to make a computer do a thing, it still fills me with delight. If I won the lottery and retired today, I'd probably still spend much of my time puttering around in codebases.
I switched from being a carpenter & builder to computer programming due to injuries preventing me from doing what is a pretty strenuous job.
Did I regret it - never! I thoroughly enjoyed programming and I was paid at least 3 times as much as I ever earned as a carpenter and often 4 or 5 times as much!
I'm now retired but I still love doing a bit of programming! I started off my programming career learning 'C' and it's still my favourite language. Since then I have also worked in Visual Basic, Java, SQL & PL/SQL and more recently C# - so full circle in some ways.
All my retirement projects are written in C# these days and although I'm not a great fan of OO languages, it works!
