Hi!

The question is about your perception of programming activity. How hard/exacting this task is?

There is much buzz about programming nowadays, people say that programmers are smart, very technical and abstract at a time, know much about world, psychology etc..

They say, that programmers got really powerful brain thing, cause there is much to keep in consideration simultaneously again with much information folded into each other associatively (up 10 levels of folding they say)))

So that is the question: What do you think about programming in general? Is it hard? Is it 'for everyone' or for the particular kind of people only? How much non-CS background do you need to program (just to program, really; enterprise applications for example)? How long is the learning curve? (again, for programming in general)

And another bunch of random questions:
- If you were not to like/love programming, would that be a serious trouble bothering your current employment?
- If you were to start from the beginning, would you chose that direction this time?
- What other areas (jobs or maybe hobbies) are comparable to programming in the way they can explode someone's lovely brain?
- Is 'non turing-complete programming' (SQL, XML, etc.) comparable to what we do or is it really way easier, less requiring, cheap and akin to cooking :)?

Well, the essence is:
How would you describe programming activity WRT to its difficulty?

Or, on the other hand:
Did you ever catch yourself thinking at some point: OMG, it's sooo hard! I don't know how would I ever program, even carried away this way and doing programming just for fun?

It's very interesting to know your opinion, your'e the programmers after all. I mean much people must be exaggerating/speculating about the thing they do not really know about. But that musn't be the case here on SO :)

P.S.: I'll try my best to update this post later, and you please edit it too. At least I'll get decent English in my question text :)