I ran across this quote from Peter Jennings (the programmer, not the newscaster) and thought it was worth republishing. It almost completely expresses my love for coding:

I love programming. It is almost impossible to explain the joy of writing software to someone who has not experienced it.

First and foremost, it is an act of creation. From a simple thought, and the arrangement of a few words and symbols, a reality is created that did not exist before.

No other activity can keep you in the moment the way that writing software can. At each step, one hundred percent of your concentration is applied to the solving of the current problem. Time disappears.

A well written program is a work of art. From conception to final presentation, the activity is that of an artist – the embodiment of a dream world expressed as an interactive experience for the user.

Peter was the author of the first commercial computer game, MicroChess, for the KIM-1 (yes, I'd never heard of it either until today). It's a chess program that runs in 1K of ram (variables and code).