You seem to have a very strict requirement for pride; I wasn't aware there was a "pitiful" tier. I feel like life would be pretty depressing if I needed to create something greater than me for the social good that had a purpose just to feel proud of my accomplishment. You can only save the whales once.
Anyway, as is the saying, "whatever gets you off". If I've managed to be particularly clever or efficient or solved a problem I haven't previously, I feel good about that. In 10 years doing this I've never collaborated on a project start to finish with other programmers but I imagine I'd feel good about that, too. I guess I just lack the ability to comprehend self-pity over a personal accomplishment.
I don't know, I recall an (unnecessarily) hard-coded HTML form in a Django project with extremely poor input validation that somebody I knew wrote. It was a single field, single button form too, I might add.
Your example only makes sense if that somebody was very proud of their hard-coded HTML form with poor validation. And even then, if it was better than they'd done before, they could still be proud.
There are "pitiful" tiers of code, relative to those who find it pitiful, but there's no such thing as pitiful pride. Essentially din0's argument is "Hey, you shouldn't feel proud about that because I have done things I consider superior! Pity yourself!" I was just trying to point out the absurd nature of that argument.
Anyway, as is the saying, "whatever gets you off". If I've managed to be particularly clever or efficient or solved a problem I haven't previously, I feel good about that. In 10 years doing this I've never collaborated on a project start to finish with other programmers but I imagine I'd feel good about that, too. I guess I just lack the ability to comprehend self-pity over a personal accomplishment.