I am Canadian. And I don't have a daughter. Therefore I don't have Internet. (Master of Logic running to be elected a Canadian Member of Parliament) Cogito ergo sum.

The Dudley Moore movie was "Crazy People" with Daryl Hannah. And remember: SONY ... because caucasians are just too damn tall. But getting back to the main point. Isn't this one of the main subplots of all primetime sitcons of the past 50 years?

I once worked with a guy, we worked for a software consulting company, and he obviously became a programmer because that's where some stupid brochure somewhere said the "good jobs" are. This guy completely lacked a programmer's instincts and was very hard to work with because he was always going through his mental checklist of how a subroutine/function should be constructed instead of just "knowing it" so we could get on with the big picture. We had a global error handler subroutine in our VB project, which was called when an error was trapped in some other routine, which would popup a msgbox to show the error. He argued with me for 10 minutes that the error occurred in "GlobalErrorHandler()" at the msgbox call because he "wasn't stupid. I know what that line does". He was a strong lad. I had to calm him down and get him to tell me the name of the routine he was currently in, which he did, and then get him to tell me why it was called that. And it still took him some time to figure it out because he "knew" he was right.

I'm sure most of the programmers reading slashdot know that at some point they go on autopilot with their "instinctual abilities" and just "know" what to do and that allows them to see beyond the mundane-ness (mundanity?) of the 100th-this-week "for" loop.

I think it's insulting to people who have toiled for countless hours learning these "crafts" to think that you can pick it up just by "wanting it" and sitting in a few classes. But I have a pickle up my butt, so there you go

And, really, tossing out ASP as a possible language option for gaming? People who really want to be something already know the answers to many of these questions.

Contrast that "short variable names" (peer comment to this) suggestion with the .Net world with object.submember.submember.submember.doSomethingSimple() and each of those submembers is 20 characters long, style guidelines become harder to adhere to. So to shorten the line you add a new line and create a temp variable to handle a couple of levels of submember and then your code is shorter column-wise but longer linewise. And how about tab-widths????