309 words
I am not a programmer
. Not that anyone who is would mistake me for one, but I feel this should be said. A couple of reasons for that may be that I dislike brackets and C in particular. I dislike most other programming languages as well. I don't have experience, I don't know how to deal with truely big projects. Judging from many of the open source projects I have looked at, many other people don't do so either. But I hope this is what they teach people in the practical parts of computer science degrees.
Another reason may be that I don't really like the act of programming itself – though it may be quite rewarding once you reach your goal – that I don't enjoy debugging, that I hate reading other people's code (and I am another person after a few weeks for that matter) and that struggling with the possibly incomplete documentation that you have to rely on (hello Cocoa!) isn't exactly fun.
But those things may not be the main point. I guess, by making programming your main activity you can learn how to do / deal with them. My main problem with being a programmer may be a lack of patience and a weakness for elegance: Every remotely usable piece of software is bound to deal with lots of special cases to deal with all possible kinds of user input. Those can be so varied that they are bound to render the code both painstaking to plan an write and rather complex and on the ugly side in the end. Nothing I am looking for.
Good programs should cater for the most demanding user. And thus creating them demands a lot of the programmer. Technical competence aside, I think that being able to do this is a main feature of a good programmer.