Broadly speaking there are programmers who think of programming as a means to an end and as an end in itself. The instrumental and intrinsic value appeal very differently to different people. I’m usually far more excited about how the TCP packets go from one end to the other rather than what’s in them. Cat pictures, banking ledgers or irrelevant spam - they are all the same to me at an abstraction below. I must have spent 10000 hours tinkering with programming languages and compilers in m...
