I, too, remember coding in a less-than-elegant language called JAM. This was before my aesthetic sense was as developed, but I was furious at having to do things in ugly ways. (VBA is similar, but I count that as a language only by the loosest, Turing sense of the word.)

What I found that helped me is the idea that every language has its own idea of what constitutes aesthetic perfection. To achieve aesthetic pleasure, one mustn't apply one's ideas of aesthetics on the language, but apply the language's idea of aesthetics. When in Rome ...

This definitely relates to the fact that a good programmer in any language can tell what language another programmer prefers. I know I can tell a C-Perl vs. a Java-Perl vs. a *shudders* COBOL-Perl script. That's because the aesthetic is different.

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.