passy
What was your best programming moment?
Oh god, that's a seriously awesome question.
And I don't think I'll be able to close this one by just providing one answer, because there really shouldn't be one past moment that was the best in your programming career but rather a continuous stream of new awesome moments that want you to keep pushing. Yeah, it's a bit like chasing the dragon ...
My first "best" programming was when I had a "Hello World" on the screen after following the instructions in my first C++ programming book. The realization that it was me who told the computer what to do through this arcane language was an incredible feeling.
After that, those moments always happened when something really clicked for the first time. Object oriented programming was a big one. I was about 10 at that time and I kept rereading that same chapter about OOP and it didn't make any sense to me. Mammals, Cats, Dogs, meow(). Wat? Looking back, I think that was the absolutely right response to it, but it still feld incredibly rewarding when I finally understood how you were supposed to shoehorn real-world things into this ill-fitting model.
There were definitely more things along the way, but more recent "click" moments included Functors, Applicative Functors, Monads, Free Monads, Comonads (to some degree), Monad Transformers, the IO type, Kleisli, Categories, Semigroups, Semigroupoids, Kleisli Composition, Foldables, Traversables, Lenses, Prisms, Arrows (kinda), TBC. Just the sheer number of things there explains why I keep looking into this stuff, because it replicates that satisfying feeling whenever you "get" one of those things. This is amplified by the fact that they are so widely applicable and you start to see the world through a new lens (no pun intended).
I'll keep this open because I think I missed a lot of "best moments", but I hope I explained the essence of what makes programming so enjoyable for me well enough.
