My 6 year old son has joined the Tamagochi craze that swept through his school and he is now carrying one of the virtual pets. Every few minutes, he pulls it out and pushes some buttons to feed it, give it medicine, play with it, and generally make it happy.

I recently started to get the same feeling when I was developing Java code in Eclipse. I'd make a change and things started turning red. Little boxes beside my source code told me that this file wasn't happy and circles with X marks in them told me that other files weren't happy either. I have to make everyone happy. Add a cast here - that one's better. Oh, change the parameter type there - good. Finally, I've finished taking care of my program and all the red marks have disappeared. Whew! Eclipse is happy now.

I will admit that it's very handy for Eclipse to point these things out for me, but it does feel like I'm working to make it feel better and make it happy. It's the programmer's Tamagochi.