Sorry, more thinking about things, rather than providing any real takeaway here.

I find certain parts of computer programming much more interesting then others. Often it is where Computation means the Brain in a very sharp way.

A computation is a sufficiently complicated calculation that I am having to create myself. This could be a programming language or a game engine along with a game. These are non obvious creations that take time and care to craft.

There is a surface that we present to the user/player with some type of "interface". How we present that interface is not well prescribed. Subtleties here can alter what user/game does and what mental model they have of the system/game.

Will they take the twisty passage or the open road? Subtleties in the presentation, sound and lighting influence their decision.

In programming the surface decides what type of problems they will choose to solve in it along with the approaches they take and errors they make a long the way.

These design questions are something I find deeply fascinating.

In these cases I consider the interface between the computation and the brain to be fairly sharp. It is only a few layers between heavy computation and these design decisions.

Perhaps my lack of experience in a lot of the UI design space has left me with the opinion that a lot of UI work in applications does not have those subtle influences. Maybe due to the huge number of layers obscuring the computation.

Then again, perhaps this a is badly thought out argument that makes no sense to anyone but me. Even future me may have a wtf moment.