The Magic is Gone

    Last time, I mentioned that I would be writing about Ruby or about a hypothetical new language. Well, I'll do that next time, because I thought of a more interesting (to me, at least) thing to write about right now.

    Have you ever felt that you aren't as excited about an activity as you used to be? Does it ever feel like the wonder and the magic are missing? That there is just something absent?
    Over the past year or so, programming has started to lose its magic. When I started programming, everything was a new experience. I would learn a new language, and then feel like suddenly the entire computer was at my fingertips. I would feel powerful, amazing, and smart, because I knew more about programming.
    I remember, when I started learning C#, I saw the "namespace" keyword and thought "that looks so cool! It's so exciting to be able to learn what it is! I wonder if it's something to do with objects, or files, or classes, or something else." I would happily learn about anything there was to learn, because it those early stages (and still now, though not quite as much), all I wanted to do was learn. Learn how to do more things and become more proficient at programming, and read a lot of material.
    But now, when I see a new language feature, it doesn't make me excited. Now I think about it in a distant manner. I think of new ideas, now, as simply another thing to use. The magic of learning new things is now gone.
    I've been thinking about this a lot, and I'm trying to figure out why I feel this way. I think I understand now, so I'll try to write my explanation as best I can:
    During the first couple of years of programming, everything was new, exciting, and novel. Because I saw how cool languages were, I decided to learn about how they worked. Because I didn't now how operating systems worked, I decided to try to implement one. Because I didn't now how x, or y, or z worked, I tried to create it.
    The problem is, now I know how languages, and operating systems, and x, and y, and z, and more, work. It no longer holds any wonder for me.
    I've created my own emulated assembly language, and wrote an interpreter for it (although it was buggy, and never quite worked). I started a project to write a mini operating system for my hypothetical assembly language. I never finished it, but after writing parts of the OS, and after reading the Minix Book of Operating Systems, it is no longer magical. I can no longer think of the computer as this fuzzy idea, just something that allows me to type in some text, and then make it run. Now I understand what an operating system does, how it works (in excruciating detail, for many parts), and now it is not magical.
    I've created my own programming language, named Prototype. I built my own lexer, parser, bytecode compiler, and bytecode interpreter for it. Now I know how all of these work, and what they do, to create a working language implementation. I no longer see C# as a magical thing, that somehow knows what I mean when I write some text on my computer screen, and then does what I say. Amazing! But now I know.
    Now I know how all of these work. They are no longer magical; I cannot any more think about them as black boxes, taking in some input and emitting some output. I know how they work, how they are implemented, the mechanisms at work, and the magic is gone.
    Once upon a time, everything was new and exciting. I couldn't wait to understand how something worked. Now I can no longer wonder, because I know how they work, and I almost wish I could go back to that time, when everything was still wonderful. But I can't.
    The magic is gone.