>You have to sweat through six months of weird error messages and missing semicolons before you get to the point where it feels like you're actually building things and making progress.
Computers are rude and honest and humans prefer a pretty lie to an ugly truth. Programmers must appreciate the ugly truth in their day-to-day lives more than any other profession. (Physical engineering and construction workers and repairers also need this virtue, but less often since their feedback cycles are slower.)