It was like that, once
Once upon a time, many years ago when I was still boyish, I was working my first real internship at a small company with a cohort of other boyish young men, also interns. We had open minds and low salary expectations, which made us suitable for a new company pursuing a strange mission.
(That company is no longer new, and it's mission has somehow become less strange as the world has changed. I wound up staying there for eight years!)
The work we were doing then was quite low-level and, dare I say, novel in its time. My cadres in the intern cohort were uniformly intelligent (much more so than me), and a good portion of them were also what we would today call neurodivergent (the terms in common parlance back then were blunter), and others were simply a little shy. It should be noted that despite these traits, some of those same individuals were capable of drinking me under the table at the company's frequent social events.
As a 34 year old boomer I permit myself to perambulate in nostalgia, but there is a point to this story. Let us come to it now.
I am a social person and was too then. The portion of my intern cadres who exhibited the gentle and unassuming traits of those who are different were still people I liked and desired to know better. I tried in various normal ways to do this until I accidentally discovered a better one.
In 2015 we still wrote, and read, code. One night I was reading the code of one of my quiet companions, and was struck by the sentiment that the code I was reading was quite beautiful. My eyes began to well with tears as I realized that through reading my companion's code, I was able to know his mind in a way that it could never otherwise have been revealed to me. This was a language in which he was expressive. This was a medium for his expression which felt private, intimate, and through which I could know, in a way, him.
It really made me cry. Ever after, whenever I worked with a colleague who was shy or less expressive, I would take special care in reading their code. Not for any professional obligation, but so that I could really know them.
That is something I do miss about programming before AI.