Slashdot Mirror
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.)
In case you were tempted to RTFA, don't. You have to click through two ad-laden pages, and there really isn't any more information than in the summary.
Perhaps you need another cup; it's "caffeine".
Your friend was doing it wrong. The intoxicant helps draw connections between things you wouldn't've necessarily thought to connect beforehand, gives you ideas, sends you off in an unexpected direction.
The work that derives from that initial idea, the actual making stuff of it, should be done sober.
I don't think the idea is you code while high. I think the idea is that getting high last night affects the way your brain works today. Either because of simple stress relief or something more complicated. LSD in particular is known to have serious and long lasting effects on brain function, and not all of them negative. For example, a single dose of LSD can increase the chances of an alcoholic staying sober by a significant margin, significant enough that if it weren't for the stigma associated with it it would probably be part of standard rehab.
Well ... it's a bit of a stretch ... but quoted from Scientific American and BBC news ...
In the current issue of the South African Journal of Science, Francis Thackeray of the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria and his colleagues document the presence of cocaine and myristic acid (a plant-derived hallucinogen) in clay-pipe fragments retrieved from the beloved bard's Stratford-Upon-Avon home. Their analysis also hints at the presence of marijuana residues.
Though the pipe cannot be definitively linked to Shakespeare himself, it is certain that it dates to the 17th century. This fact came as a surprise to the scientists; previously, the earliest known record of cocaine in Europe dated to only 200 years ago.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=shakespeare-on-drugs
The weed relieves the stress and makes him happy.
It really isn't that difficult to understand.
I have depression issues, I take anti-depressants, it is not contradictory that the end result is that I am not depressed.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.