I would classify myself as a hybrid Hobbyist/Pure Scientist. I originally started programming in a Comp. Sci. class in high school, but I learned other languages (read: Perl and some less important ones ;) for the fun of it.
Now, I have the good fortune to be in a position where I get paid to write code (as a part time job) and be in a major (math) where I can use Perl as a scientist. Earlier this semester I wrote a couple of scripts to generate all possible operation tables of an arbitrary order and check for semigroups; the only difficult parts were waiting while my laptop generated 20,000 pages of LaTeX markup and trying to explain to my class that no, it really wasn't that time consuming - yes, I really did do all this over this past weekend. But
that kind of experience is apparently fairly common place.
