Probably the last place to look for first-class Usability, User Interface, User Experience, etc., is in anything related to programming. The worst people on earth, empirically, to be responsible for how software is created are the programmers themselves. Just take a look at IDEs, one of the most fundamental tools used in software development. Pretty much they are all nightmares. Personally I think the IntelliJ stuff is the rare exception that proves the rule, and even that isn't free of bugs and weird bad unergonomic usability problems. 

Since both my day job and one of my hobbies is programming, I really am day in day out depressed about the whole situation. Is it because only money talks? Is it because we are all too stupid to do a better job? Is it because nobody is aware enough to realize that the emperor has no clothing? Is it because in reality getting such a complicated system to not suck is a super hard problem, both just technically but also because usability has a fair amount of subjective preference involved? Is it all of the above? Well, yes, probably, yes.

:-(

Even if you ditch the GUI kind of IDE and are just using VIM or Emacs or Notepad++ then you still have all the problems of how broken the UX is of the programming languages themselves, and all the other non-GUI-IDE ancillary tools.

Anyway, the idea of achieving any kind of "mental state of Flow" with programming has long since vanished in my life, really. There are a few times when I have maybe 10 minutes of it because I am noodling on one small thing, but even then I am usually constantly hitting horrible UX fails of the IDEs.

c’est soupirer