How do I make programing fun again?

How do I get excited about programing again? I used to think it was exciting ans cool, but the online beginners classes I took in Actionscript, Java, C# and C++ at college were boring and killed my interest so I ended up graduating with a BS in business administration instead.

All I wanted to do was learn enough programing to make indie video games, not follow boring console application tutorials. But I couldn't find a circle to share my work with like ZUN did when he was making Touhou. Today I hate business, I hate drones, I hate greasy greedy businessmen, and now that I don't like most video games, I'm kind of depressed. And as I age, my old dream recedes because video games are less fresh/exciting/rewarding/important, and seem like 1800's nickel romance novels. (Pure escapism that won't fix problems in the world, and a transient form of drug that will be forgotten.) Some of you have explored the computer science field more than me, I have a question for you. How could I get back into programing and make it make me happy?

Sorry for the blog post.

Figure out what you want to do, then do it. Things worth doing are rarely easy.

In other words, if you don't want to make games, figure out what kind of software you do want to make, then sack up and make it.

It's only fun if you're doing what you wanna do, and don't get stuck on something very difficult.

Programming is fun outside of video games, if you can't do some simple terminal based challenges for fun (I'm not talking corporate shit, just look up some easy problems in online judges) then you are out of luck, you will never find it fun.

Instead of thinking of making terminal applications as boring, try to find a project that is useful to you in some way instead. This way you can get a mind shift with your way of thinking about it, so it will be easier to do

A common first is writing something to do backups for you, or if you are a privacy / security advocate make a program to help with something on that front

This
But if you don't know what you want to make then simple video games are excellent programming practice. Try making a game from the ground up using an easier framework (highly recommend love2d which uses Lua) instead of one of those monolithic shitting languages you mentioned in the first paragraph. No one just releases a hit game without learning the smaller shit incrementally first. Most of these wildly successful indie games from the past few years are anything but luck, but are rather highly calculated and engineered programs based on years and years of incremental fuckups / I guess it's called "learning".

This too. Make doing programming challenges a video game. It's like a video game that actually makes you smarter. Pretend you're a hacker leveling up your skill points or some shit if you're that desperate. Programming is more fun the more you know how to do, and you only really get better if you do it every single day. Not a few times a week for a few hours. A few hours a day every day.

I think that I understand how you feel, user. Not too long ago, after long period of not making anything useful, I stated feeling kinda depressed (I was not interested in doing anything, spent my days playing vidya and watching tv), even coding stopped bringing me joy like it did before.
Then one day I grew tired of my old desktop background image and decided to find some new one. I found that MS posts new image on bing every day, found that they have bing image gallery and that gallery does not have download all button.
Since those backgrounds are really nice and I did not want to manually download every image (more than 2300 images are in that gallery) I opened Emacs and started hacking on Python script to automate downloading all those images (Python is my preferred language for scraping web) and coding was fun again.
After I finished that script my work morale literally skyrocketed and I was ready to create more software.
Try to solve some small problem that you have by coding, it might have same effect on you.

TL;DR: Create "small wins" to gain enthusiasm for creating software again.

Sorry for diary post. I hope that this will somehow help you.

More frequent/numerous smaller challenges makes things a lot easier to learn and memorize.

One neat thing with the programming challenge sites, is that some let you compare you answer to other people's. You can see how slow your code runs compared to everyone else's and find ways to improve it until you're in the top percentile.

You have been visited by the designated Pajeet of shitting code, indians will steal your proprietary code, unless you program for at least an hour a day for the rest of your life.namaste and thank you for contacting Microsoft Oracle tech.this has been Ramjesh speaking with you todayPlease do feel free to Leave feedbacks if you were happy with today's call.

Create a toy program for something useful to you personally, or look for free/open source software you already use that you can improve. Both of those things worked really well for me. It's satisfying to use something you created daily, and even more so if you know other people use it.

For a game, use something that makes your work fast and easy, like Love2D or Pygame or Minetest mods.

stop playing weeaboo games

OP, I can't stress this enough.
You know the feeling you get when you built a something?
It's like that, but your shit can also be useful to other people.
For example, for screen brightness I use a script I made, nothing huge, but it's something I needed, something I wanted, and something I liked, so I built it.
For me, that's what programming is: building something you want.

Also, consider that sometimes, even if they are console programs, the logic behind them is amazing. For example, you could have a program for finding graph partitions, and just output the subgraphs to plain text, and it'd look dry, but what it's doing on the inside, is amazing.

Programming challenge: write a game in 300 lines of code or less. Or do it like in demoscene: 4 KB or 64 KB binary file. Another possible twist: you can only use text mode.

I kinda have a different problem. I get really enthusiastic about a coding project but as it takes longer to bring anything back I start to drift away from it. I have lots of unfinished projects because of this. My guess for the reason is that a lot of my projects don't bring the "instant gratification" (get results on the first try/easily, etc.) and I get bored because I don't see anything in return from my efforts.

Wat do, Holla Forumsnicians?

you neets never learn

Can you name a few projects and the languages and libraries you use for them?

IRC bot in python (irclib)
HTML+CSS+JS game (pure JS)
Operating system kernel (ASM + C)
Terminal incremental game (C + ncurses)
TempleOS modification (Holy C)
Android app for unit conversion (Java + android library)
Parser for 3 different self-crafted languages (Python)
BlazeChan (PHP)

and other shit i can't remember from the top of my head.

You gotta start somewhere faggot. Every "hello world" lesson is the same anyways.

Pic related.

When I started coding I found myself in same situation as you. I would start some "awesome big project"™, lose interest in it over time and never finish it. I solved that problem by 'divide and conquer' tactic. I started splitting my project into sub-projects. Then if needed I split those sub-projects into even smaller projects and so on. In the end I have a lot of small projects where each project is small enough that I can solve it before I lose interest.
One important difference that I noticed after I did it is that I was able to go from "Today I worked on X, I think I could finish it in the next few months." to "Today I created X." or "In few days I will finish X." when talking about things that I am working on.

Drop it in favor of python or similar.

Here is your reply

just go back into the trash bin you crawled out of

Programming is by definition plodding drudgery. That's why they call it "hacking", you have to hack away at it like cutting down a tree with a hatchet.
You get a reward for it in that you've got a job done, but the work itself is just that: work.

You are a retard, you don't even know what a skiddie is.

You can't make something that's inherently unfun into something that is fun.

Why don't you go do something productive like make a new Temple OS addon since you're clearly God's gift to programming?

You best be of jokings, comrade.

Fun things are fun.

OP should consider having fun with basic crypto, that is always fun. Then move on to text adventure games. Angband has all the source code fir your enjoyment. Make some mods, then try your hand at making something from scratch.

On the shoulders of Giants.

If you find console application tutorials boring, maybe programming isn't for you. Is there any experience you had programming that you enjoyed? It's not clear if you got to the point of writing games yourself. Maybe you would like frontend programming? If you don't like corporations, lots of free software could do with better UX.

What about that guy that posted coobs? Making coobs might be fun?

I don't understand. Urban Dictonary has coobs as a cross between cool and boobs, which is just a way of saying "tits".

It was just a misspelling of cubes. There were a bunch of spam threads on Holla Forums and Progrider /prog/. The suggestion being, play around with graphivs and you can make something simple that looks cool and is fun to play with.

Making cubes is the very first thing you do in most 3D graphics programming. OpenGL, DirectX, etc. Most game programmers never get into that level of detail, they use tools specially designated for their role: character modeling, rigging, level design, etc. Check out >>>/agdg/ for more about getting into game programming. Your best bet is to probably pick up an existing game engine and have fun with that, and dial down your expectations. You are on a years long journey, not a week. If you want a week-long journey you should pick up a game engine marketed at kids and just make your thing. Rpgmaker or something. It all depends on what you are trying to do.

Post discarded.

literally OP

I'm trying to figure it out myself. Here are some things that have helped me:

When you get the idea for a tiny program/script that can scratch an itch, drop everything and make it immediately. For instance, I've made quite a few bookmarklets to automate common web browsing tasks.

For larger projects, get away from the computer. Whether it's a library, a coffee shop, your back porch, or the kitchen table, find a place where you can bury your face into a notebook for an hour or two. Don't write actual code on paper (that's retarded), just think about the problems, the data structures, the algorithms. Computers are simply too distracting for this kind of mental work.

That said, don't only spend your time planning. Better to start programming with an incomplete plan, than to spend a week meticulously planning everything and lose interest and motivation before you've written a single line.

Rely heavily on libraries. Ignore the voice in the back of your head telling you how shit the library's code is, and how easy it would be to write your own replacement. Otherwise you'll waste all of your motivation on the library code, have nothing interesting to show for it, and give up on the project.

Instead, you should be trying to "get something on screen" (or your domain's equivalent) as quick as possible, so that when the initial surge of motivation fades away, your creation itself should be neat enough to spark your interest again in a day or two. Remember, if the library really is shit, you can always replace it later.

Don't listen to these amateur!!
Here is a small lesson which you gotta learn.
Sometimes, if you don't feel like programming because you are too lazy then the only way to make programming fun again is DRUGS.

when it comes to drugs, I would say LSD,Marijuana,mushrooms, and other spiritual drugs (don't use cocain or amphetamines or heroin).

As a experience drug user and programmer I would say that each code is a spiritual journey which you take, through these spiritual journeys you are going to go very deep down to your subconsciousness, and you are going to see things of true beauty which are difficult to explain to a person who is not fucked up on drugs while programming.

I always knew niggers couldn't read, didn't think they'd be this blatant.

yep

+1 to all of this (though adderall helps)