Recently I had the wonderful experience of solving a hard problem in a very elegant way. I spent hours going through iteration after iteration, each one slightly more ugly than the last, until I stumbled upon an amazingly simple solution that completely solved the problem far better than any of the previous methods. I spent the rest of the night revelling in the clarity and simplicity of the solution; I've never taken any drugs, but it must have felt very much like being high. Does anyone else experience similar highs while coding?

Shawn

I was really proud to write a php-object to JSON converter with many for-loops and indentation, and then seeing that it worked for my needs. However, I was really upset that PHP4 didn't have it built-in as I would rather not go through that.

However, that does not compare to the feeling I have when I create a great user-interface. Maybe not pretty, but when I figure out how to add a few things here or there and a new feature that makes sense but doesn't get in the user's way, and something I would love to have, and I know others would love it, too, and I know it's so good others will copy it--that's when I really, really get excited.

I get really excited and say "yeah" outloud when I have those moments.

Some Lisp coders have mentioned brain orgasms when discovering something great about the language.

I was bouncing around for a few hours when I removed 20 lines of Python and replaced it with one line

Recently, I've been on a high when I got my lisp code to run 60% faster by changing 10 lines of code. I think I tend to experience relief more often than high while coding. Highs are like a promise that something good is going to happen soon. My brain is telling me I have an answer just let me find the words.

My favorite coding "high" is sleep deprivation mixed with dangerous levels of caffeine. I'll sometimes work until ~5AM and be really tired, then get a "second wind" and be wide-awake until the afternoon coding like I'm on speed.

There's also the excited "holy crap this is cool" high, which is more like a tingling giddiness at how interesting something is. Like a child who can't sit still the night before Christmas. Nothing motivates me more than this feeling.

I can second the first "high" (sleep dep + pot of coffee). Afterwards I usually crash pretty hard though. I do usually find the time extremely productive. Maybe because the rest of the world stops being interesting from 3-7am.

There is an energy apparent when giving order to chaos, which to me happened when I really nailed how my web app would order its information presentation in an elegant way to the public, which would in turn order people's minds in the way they view the topic of the site, Israeli technology (I would Hope).

I tend to come up with ideas while pacing around away from the computer, and thinking of a better way to do something is a kind of "high". Sitting at the computer tends to be less high-level thinking and more implementation detail. But when something works, that's a high, too.

Yes. But they're different from being high via chemicals.

far33d, why would this be different. The same sensory pathways are initiated regardless of the stimulus. Repeated positive stimuli generate the feeling of addiction.

The same pleasures can be had while coding.

Coding never gave me a hangover or visual hallucination.

Excellent point.

I figured. I was wondering if that sort of feeling is common for coders.