There are at least a couple of places I've seen with a premium on practicing programming. On one side, the Software Craft crowd certainly has an emphasis on various kinds of practice --- a bit of a pity about the evangelical complementarianism lurking too close to the surface. Actual composers & musicians, coming out of artistic traditions that emphasis practice and virtuosity have developed Live Coding as a hybrid musical/programming art form. Then I guess the Coding Dojo movement in some ways unifies the two - programmers meet to practice by livecoding simple examples

Thank you! You've inspired me (among other things) to write my own comment system with Javascript.

Hope you do realize that those expert musicians mostly learn, practice and master only one musical instrument and genre, which stays constant throughout their careers/life-times. Contrast that with the world of computing where your chosen combination of ISA, OS, programming language/system undergo major upheavals on an almost every 3 year basis.

It would be unwise to compare a professional in the world of computing with that in any other.

I share your inclination to automate. My life, and technique, are infinitely better because of these real-world programming experiences.

Another thing that I think worth mentioning is refactoring. I relentlessly refactor programs I work on. It drives my bosses/clients crazy but, when I need to change something, I almost never am willing to just patch in the change. Instead, I reorganize the program so that it looks like the new function was part of the original design.

This makes the program much stronger but by revisiting the ideas I used in the past, I understand my current strategies much better. Almost always, I find real problems that lurked in the old code and, by seeing and structuring those out of existence, I learn to avoid similar mistakes in the future. I also become more aware of what I think is right and good.