I started programming on an amateur basis in 1984, professionally in 1997. I'm 52 now. My experience is that coding has become more and more interesting and pleasant. In the early days, I had to deal with under-powered languages that either couldn't do certain things or that made them very difficult. Then I encountered languages that were much more pleasant to use, but had other problems such as not scaling well to team-level development -- sometimes even I couldn't figure out what I had been doing. Languages are clearer now, they make thinking about problems easier, and while this issue has not disappeared, it's less bad for me than it used to be.
For me, tools, including languages, do matter. I can well imagine that programming in Java would be soul-deadening (although Java is still better than some languages of the past).
Incidentally, I am not dunking on languages of the past. Lisp has been around for a long time, as has Smalltalk or Haskell or ML. Many of those languages were not accessible to anyone without a mainframe or expensive workstation. This situation has improved greatly in the past decades, which to me is another reason to prefer coding today versus the past.
Obviously, most of us are not able to cherry-pick our toolset for work. We use whatever our employer says to use, or whatever the demands of our project require. This may be part of why many people find coding to be an uninspiring experience. Also, the problems that people work on might be dull, it's hard to get motivated about a basically tedious problem.
Last, it's worth acknowledging that some people just don't love coding all that much. It's hard to imagine doing really well at something you don't deeply enjoy day in and day out. And your passion can change over time: you might really enjoy something in one part of your life, and not derive much joy from it at another part.
For me, tools, including languages, do matter. I can well imagine that programming in Java would be soul-deadening (although Java is still better than some languages of the past).
Incidentally, I am not dunking on languages of the past. Lisp has been around for a long time, as has Smalltalk or Haskell or ML. Many of those languages were not accessible to anyone without a mainframe or expensive workstation. This situation has improved greatly in the past decades, which to me is another reason to prefer coding today versus the past.
Obviously, most of us are not able to cherry-pick our toolset for work. We use whatever our employer says to use, or whatever the demands of our project require. This may be part of why many people find coding to be an uninspiring experience. Also, the problems that people work on might be dull, it's hard to get motivated about a basically tedious problem.
Last, it's worth acknowledging that some people just don't love coding all that much. It's hard to imagine doing really well at something you don't deeply enjoy day in and day out. And your passion can change over time: you might really enjoy something in one part of your life, and not derive much joy from it at another part.