Educators’ experience shows that learning programming is in many aspects problematic for novice software engineering students. On the other hand, software engineering processes and the view of programming has been changing during the recent years. In this paper, we address socio-cognitive aspects of computer science and software engineering in order to contribute to programming education enhancement: the research is focused on students’ temperament style and favorite programming learning activities. The study of 158 first and second year students, studying programming specialties in five higher education institutions, has been presented. The “psychological portrait” of the surveyed students reflects the evolution of the temperament style in programming during last decades. The attitudes towards the programming activities, presented in this paper, may contribute to the development of enhancement of existing programming courses in higher education.