Sometimes I get inspired, and can write thousands of lines of a program without even a design upfront just based on an idea, being limited only by how fast I can type. Like when I was playing with my parser assembler language earlier this week (my remaining problem is what to do about error handling). This is not one of those times.
Other times, I can stare at a screen, and be completely unable to get anywhere, even though I know exactly what is needed. Tonight the cursor is just taunting me. I've been playing with the naive bayesian filter in PHP that I mentioned the other day, and it's simple code - I know exactly what I need to do to achieve what I want, but it just takes forever to write the code.
I hate days like this...
Great comment you left on computers and kids. It really advances the discussion...
I think I would have loved computer programming, but when I was in college only the most dedicated did it - you had to book time in the computer lab at 3 in the morning, and it was way the hell away from where everybody lived. And even a few years after that I remember my ex-husband trudging at odd hours into a computer lab with shoeboxes full of cards to process his data. It's a different world.
It's never to late to start ;) I guess I more or less belong to the first generation of kids that got it in from we were small thanks to home computers - it really helped in many ways, but mainly because it was a computer environment that really encouraged programming.
It's one of the reason I really find Windows annoying - it creates this barrier between the computer as a "end user" tool and the computer as a programming tool that makes it so easy for people to never ever be exposed to programming in any form.