I don't know if anyone else has had this experience, but for awhile in my teens to early 20s, I strived really hard to be a good musician. Everytime I would notice a marked improvement, I would have this almost excruciating sense of being overwhelmed. It was like almost forcing me out of reality, because I couldn't simply believe it. Sure enough, though, the next day I'd work on music I would be at a different level of sorts and would be on to tackling the next challenge.
Due to the fact that music doesn't really pay all that well, and I went for a comp. sci. degree, I've ended up as a software developer. What I'm starting to notice now, though, is that I haven't really had the same experience with developing my technical chops as a developer. I think I need to find more interesting projects outside of work to really scratch that creative itch.
This is where the "learn a language in a different paradigm" advice comes in. And do a non-trivial project in it. It shouldn't be enormous, but it needs to be non-trivial.
Yep, I just started diving into Clojure. It's really been a shift for me, even though I took a class in Haskell. I still haven't totally internalized the functional paradigm. I'm really eager to see how it changes my understanding of the current crop of languages I use (C#, Java, Ruby).
Due to the fact that music doesn't really pay all that well, and I went for a comp. sci. degree, I've ended up as a software developer. What I'm starting to notice now, though, is that I haven't really had the same experience with developing my technical chops as a developer. I think I need to find more interesting projects outside of work to really scratch that creative itch.