September 26, 2011
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Misery and Coding

Christopher Beam puts some Standord CS students in the spotlight.

Pleasure comes with pain. You code for hours, you run the program, it fails, you debug it, run it again, pass out on your keyboard, wake up, code some more. But when it finally works, it’s a rush. Thompson, who has dabbled with cocaine in the past, compares it to the drug. “Writing code to me is the same experience,” he says. “It’s misery, misery, misery, misery, euphoria.