@steckschwein_6502 you could see it that way, but I honestly don't experience the feeling I mean as frustration. It is actual _amusement_, like when you get a joke. The combination of understanding why something seemed sensible to me at the time, and also why it's totally wrong, often has (for me) that same contrast and unexpectedness that makes jokes funny.

I do feel frustration (of course), but more often when I'm failing to come up with a good idea at all, rather than when I do something and it doesn't work.

@lnr when I was at school, we had a guy come to give us a talk, and he started by saying "I'm going to teach you how to juggle". In fact he discussed the mechanics of juggling not at all – what he taught was a technique for transforming frustration into amusement during the initial phase of learning when you're doing nothing but drop the balls and pick them up again, on the theory that that's why most people give up before succeeding.

His suggestion was: every time you drop a ball, tell yourself a joke, and bend down to pick the ball up just as you get to the punchline, so that you learn to associate picking up balls from the floor with amusement.

(And then he went on from that starting point to apply the same ideas to exam revision, which was the main point of his talk.)

Sadly, I'd already learned to juggle when I heard this talk, so I couldn't test whether the idea worked!

@fedward @simontatham I have a friend and former coworker who is currently maintaining a stack of bioinformatics/sequence analysis stuff originally developed by ...let's be kind and say, "non-coders", that I completely rewrote during a period of pretty high stress, and he periodically toots out comments that I left behind. It's amusing.

(As a sample, the first line of the project's README.md was "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"...)

@ren totally agree – a workplace that puts you under constant pressure to never make a mistake is utterly toxic. _Especially_ if you feel under that pressure from day 1 when you're still learning your way around, because it's even more obvious that people will make mistakes while learning than that they'll carry on making mistakes once they're up to speed (though both are true).

Not only that, but a workplace of that kind isn't even serving its _own_ interests, because if it's trying to incentivise employees to never make a mistake, what it's really doing is incentivising them to never _look_ as if they make a mistake. So the mistakes get covered up and the company never finds out about all the problems.