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Comment by thataccount | Hacker News Reader

I'm calling bull on this. Learning languages, at certain points, is always tedious. Whether that language is a computer language, or something like Greek, there comes a moment where "trudging" begins. The reason a person "trudges" is that they have a goal in mind that makes the trudging something to endure until that goal is achieved. Fun comes from not having to solve the same problem sixty times, or having to sort through a million files by hand when a program can do it in 3 seconds.

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Hmm. I find learning fun, no matter what the scope is - even Greek, which remains obscure to me. (Quick, ask me something about Greek! I'll nod wisely and stroke my chin in deep thought and then get distracted and wander elsewhere.) But you're not wrong: there's a fun discovery phase, then a "hey, does this actually work" phase, and then a "crap, I need to figure out how to MAKE it work" phase, all of which are decision points where one might choose to not bother.

It totally depends whether you're still experimenting and learning or not, which is totally circumstantial. Sometimes I slog through things at the start, on the promise that they will start to be fun once I see the point.

Easiness is fun because it enables more messing around and learning. Not having to solve a problem is not fun, because problems are learning opportunities and are fun, unless they're just trivial obstructions in the way of the real problems of interest.

Indeed! That's how it works, pretty much every time, unless language choice is dictated from above, which ALSO happens.

(And is why I know COBOL today, although I'm probably stronger on COBOL-77 than COBOL-85, when I STARTED COBOL after COBOL-85 was a thing.)

Maybe not "fun", but people have preferences, not necessarily rational, in the choices they make. Programming languages, technologies, and even fonts.

Some languages are more enjoyable to use than others. I'm sure there are features/syntax/constructs in languages that you irrationally don't like.

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