This fascination you describe I think is the human desire for puzzle solving. Whether ancient astronomers working out the paths of stars and planets, or Greek mathematicians deriving proofs, or engineers throughout history developing new ways to accomplish things.

When I was in grade school, LONG before personal computers or even calculators, one of my fascinations in English class was diagramming sentences (I don't know if they still teach that, but it consisted of graphically representing the parts of speech of a sentence to analyze its structure). Anyhow, years later I realized that my fascination with computer languages was directly descendant to this... it was just another type of statement parsing.