Eight years isn't very long at all. Many of us love programming, 20, 30, or even 40 years later. It's the challenge of making a lump of metal do exactly what it is that you want it to do.
In the beginning, I thought that playing computer games would be great. They aren't. I find them boring because they can't give me the challenge that plain old programming can do.
Eight years. <grin>
That reminds me of the story of the city boy who met an old moonshiner and proceeded to tell him that he drank a bottle of hard liquor a day.
The moonshiner replied "A bottle? Hell, I spill more'n that!"