Do Recreational Drugs Help Programmers?

jfruh writes "Among the winners of last night's election: marijuana users. Voters in both Washington and Colorado approved referenda that legalized marijuana for recreational use, though the drug remains illegal under federal law. There's been a long-standing debate among programmers as to whether recreational drugs, including pot and hallucinagens like LSD, can actually help programmers code. Don't forget, there was a substantial overlap between the wave of computer professionals who came of age in the '60s and that era's counterculture." (There's even a good book on that topic.)

Comments

maybe

[pablo_max]

I will program something while not being high and see if it makes a difference, later though. So far I am still collecting data points.

Re:maybe

[durrr]

Here's a video of the drugged spiders
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1n15JxrBJ8

Re:maybe

[ColdWetDog]

That's as far as you got? I wrote an entire content management system while stoned.

It worked pretty well, only problem was that I could never remember how it worked for some reason.

Oh, you're the bozo who coded Lotus Notes? At least there was a reason for it.

tht depends

[lister king of smeg]

Is the pot free as in beer or free as in speech

Spice

[a-zarkon!]

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains. The stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget how stunningly crap the spec and use cases you've been provided are?

Re:inpaired thinking = bad coding

[AdmiralXyz]

I would expect code produced under the influence to have more bugs, less comments and generally be an unmaintainable mess.

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion man.

No

[Chemisor]

This is your code:

int factorial (int n)
{
    int r = 1;
    for (int i = 1; i < n; ++i)
        r *= i;
    return (r);
}

This is your code on drugs:

f(int n){int i=n,r;l:r=(i!=n?r*i:unix);if (--i)goto l;return (r);}

Any questions?

Re:What?

[tftp]

Majority of coding work should be preemptive coding for scalability.

PHB: Listen, Bill, I have a small programming task for you. We need an application that pops a dialog up, asks for a number, and appends that number, as plain text, to a file. Could you put this together before lunch?

Bill: Hey, boss, this is a major undertaking. Since we want to ensure scalability of this application I need to make it so it accepts a form definition language, parses it, executes scripts in another language, and then spits it into a variable, programmable set of databases which could be plain text files as you want, or ODBC connections, or The Cloud. Of course we want strong crypto on all that, and biometric authentication at every step. My team of ten will probably do it within a year or two.

PHB: Bill, are you high?

Re:Caffine

[Chrutil]

was anybody talking to you, faggot? if you value your health, you better shut the fuck up too.

Dude, decaf.