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Compensated the downvote, that was funny too.
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Gave it a 5, tho. Funny response.
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Bert, I've held onto this story for 40 years - I think it's humorous. But... if the shoe fits...
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The story IS humorous...it's your conclusion that sucked.
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Some people are just sensitive.
Hell, I'm blonde, polish, and mennonite. If I took offense at every opportunity, I'd be mad at probably half the jokes ever written.
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Hmm, American Football? I've long been bemused by the misnomer!
Why do you a call game in which players run around carrying, throwing, and catching a ball "football", though the ball is hardly ever touched by feet? It would be more accurate to call it "hand ball".
The real game of football is one of skill based on using the feet to control a ball. It is not a "game" of brute force - battery, barging and wrestling - nor of grown men rolling around on the ground cuddling each other in large groups 
The made up word "soccer" does nothing to describe the game, but is slang derived from the word "association", as in Football Association, the body which drew up the rules of play in the 19th century.
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That might not imply that all programmers with philosophy degrees suck, but I will imply it, using the following logic: philosophies, like religions, are methods of restricting the way one's brain works. Pretty much anyone studying enough philosophy will eventually come across one he'll glom onto because it appeals to whatever's lacking in his own personality: in the same way that psychology students study psychology to find out why they're f***ed, philosophy students study philosophy because they're trying to find a philosophy that suits them. So then, taking this, make them into programmers and see how far they get. It's almost guaranteed to be a disaster.
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Dan, did you read your posting before you hit send? Your argument is simply an ad hominem followed by a supposedly conclusive statement. If this is an appropriate display of your logic, I'd hate to see what happens to one of your programs when it hits an 'if-else' statement. Let's begin.
'Philosophies are methods of restricting the way one's brain works.' Now, Dan when you make statements like this, it is good to include at least one line of justification. Nevertheless, there seems to be some ignorance on your part about what philosophy is. You seem to be suggesting that it is a belief or attitude like 'hey man, my philosophy is love everyone'. The word philosophy is greek for 'love of wisdom'. The subject matter is meta in nature. It is interpreting and understanding beliefs. Second, you should never make arguments by analogy since the analogy is never precise. You could have picked that up in a logic course in college. Finally everyone has a 'philosophy' (that's the naive sense in which you're using the word), Dan. But I fail to see this connection: studying a philosophy --> wanting a philosophy that suits (vague) one --> bad programmers. You wrote, Dan. I only distilled it. Guess that BA is good for something after all.
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It's called "humour" -- apparently, this is different from "humor" in some subtle way. LOL
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Hmmm, didn't somebody once observe that there is more in the world than what your or my philosophy contain? Think he was called Shakes A Spear, wrote it about 10 years ago. 
I'll have to agree with you on this one. Faulty logic leads to bad conclusions:
I met a really bad programmer once, no matter what I did, he wouldn't get better.
He was human.
Therefore all humans are bad programmers.
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Mr. Spear was writing about a fantasy world - not reality! You write like a real Ph.D
Some humans were brilliant programmers, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Charlie Bachman and many others come to mind regardless of what I did. Don't think any of them had one of those - you know (ph.d)
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Yes, I pile it higher and deeper at times. I did actually get a degree in BS.
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steve jobs was not a programmer - where do you people get this stuff?
he was a salesman and a manager, thats it. oh and human
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And a forward-thinker, not many of us are! My mistake, of course I meant 'The Woz'
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Correction Steve Jobs was not a brilliant programmer though no doubt he was a brilliant salesman. Common misconception, in reality Jobs sold Wozniak's programs. 
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Hi r, I am a brilliant programmer - created the very first mainframe terminal emulator program for the Apple II - called it 'STEM' (you figure it out). Wished I'd had Steve around to sell it for ME!
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For sure who doesn't want Steve to sell their stuff. Someone who can convince a planet full of people that they need some crap that they had never even seen before has to be the g8est Salesman.
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Edsger Dykstra pointed out philosophy majors as one of the better sources of good programmers in his article criticizing computer science programs as not producing a better crop of programmers. You see, there is very little opportunity to learn analysis in computer science, because the programs are oriented to teaching technique and theory - it wasn't until graduate school that I was REQUIRED to have adequate error handlers in my homework code, or to analyze its performance and optimize it for peak efficiency. More than half of the students my classes in the M.S. Comp Sci program had degrees in areas other than computer science.
Contrast this with philosophy, where detailed formal analyses of philosphical positions and the consequences that arise from them are demanded from you starting sophomore year. Or to my major, psychology (the B.S. kind, not the B.A. kind), where in my sophomore year I had to turn in nine separate experimental reports with analysis (my B.S. program also required two semesters of BASIC programming, as our faculty believed that learning to program would help us perform statistical analyses and mathematical models of behavior as the state of the art improved). And of course there's physics and mathematics, both of them producing bumper crops of programmers every year. Computer science programs have improved a bit thanks to the criticisms of Dykstra and others...but the other fields have not themselves grown less difficult.
I don't know what your background is, but the fact is, ANYONE can become a programmer without ever having to learn to write an explicit report detailing how and why their program works, and what its side effects could be if left in operation. Most programmers, in fact, are barely competent enough to leave understandable comments. About 90% of programmers are what I call "coders", as they will code whatever they're told to code. Virtually every programmer I've met who I'd consider to be in the ten percent I call "developers" had a bachelor's degree in another area, and sometimes a master's in another area as well.
You might want to consider a bit more exposure to philosophy and psychology yourself, enough at least to avoid making yourself look like a bigoted pinbrain by making childishly insulting and glaringly ignorant remarks about these fields - believe me, there's plenty of room for critiques and VALID insults in both fields if only you know more about them than the fact that you don't like them.
As I said earlier, your story was amusing, it's just the conclusion that rankled. Your defense of that conclusion is worthless, useless, and not amusing in the least, except in one small respect: you're actually boorish enough to write this stuff where anyone can read it, and still believe you can be taken seriously.
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Hmmm... I'm wondering how many sense-of-humour-failures I can notch up today. Yes, yes - you're right... except in one thing: not anyone can become a programmer: I'd say one person in a hundred probably can, in a real sense: I also don't think it's a discipline that can be taught unless you're predisposed to doing it anyway.
Incidentally, I'm not defending my conclusion, and I hardly expected anyone to take it seriously, let alone waste five paragraphs attacking it. However (check your psychology degree for this one) I guess I must've touched a nerve since that's what happened.
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Dan Sutton wrote: Incidentally, I'm not defending my conclusion, and I hardly expected anyone to
take it seriously, let alone waste five paragraphs attacking it. However (check
your psychology degree for this one) I guess I must've touched a nerve since
that's what happened
It was the tone of the message more than anything else - it's a tone I'm all too familiar with ("think you're smart, college boy?"). Unfortunately, it's never easy to tell exactly what attitude is behind the print you see on the Web without explicit markers of some sort (e.g. <over-the-top-exaggeration-'cause-i'm-irritated>). Again, and also unfortunately, you managed to quote (with nearly identical phrasing) more than one programmer I worked with in the past, and those quotes were being directed to me personally...which might have been easier to take if I didn't have twice the programming skills asleep that these individuals had on their best day. All told, it was all too easy to believe you meant what you said in exactly the way you said it...but, as my own hot buttons had been pressed, I didn't take the time to ask you if you really meant it that way before I launched my "retaliatory strike." Apologies.
I do note that programming education was pretty happenstance forty years ago, and that few if any resource materials were available to assist your education unless your employer provided them. At my high school in 1974, my first BASIC course was taught using a teletype hooked in the old GE Apple Time Sharing Service, 300 baud (bits-per-second, more or less) and paper tape to store the program. We were taught the language, but not really how to use it effectively. It wasn't until college that I was introduced to structured programming and why spaghetti code was bad...but by the time I was finishing my M.S., enormous advances had been made available to anyone who could buy or borrow a book on algorithms and data structures, or even how to document your program. And still, the clueless would wind up with programming jobs. I helped hire such a total waste of space myself in 1999 for an Internet start-up...she could program, she just couldn't figure out how to read someone else's code and understand it, so she wrote everything from scratch...and while it worked some of the time, reinventing the wheels we had already built and were busily polishing was not on our agenda that year, especially since it was obvious from her code that she was not going to be giving the Turing lecture any time soon nor writing any of the three programmers senior to her out of a job. And yes, she was a computer science graduate  who, when she resigned from our job (we decided not to tell her we were going to fire her that week anyway), was moving to North Carolina to help her husband sell real estate  thus saving her potential future employers quite a few headaches, IMHO.
Oh, BTW, remind me to tell you sometime about the stripper I met who could debate Kantian ethics as easily as she could twirl her tassels...but that's a story for another day.
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Yeah - I got lucky: my first programming teacher taught us Algol 60 (this would've been at some point in the late '70s or something): he refused to teach us BASIC ("I'm here to teach programming, not Pidgin English!") so structure came into it pretty early on, as did Dijkstra, who was a god as far as our teacher was concerned... Of course, by then I'd already been programming (at home) for several years -- I did notice that most of the students who couldn't already program by the time they started the class never really learned -- it appeared to have to be something one would cultivate in one's self, rather than just a type of course material like any other. In any event, after that came a PDP 11/34 which had paper tape readers, punch card readers, and a front panel with a bunch of lights on it where you could program the thing one instruction at a time, by putting your (binary) op code into an accumulator, putting a "store" instruction into the instruction register and then hitting the "execute one instruction" button. Beautiful. Makes you really understand how great the Pascal compiler on the thing was.
I've generally tried to avoid hiring programmers to work on any of my stuff -- as a veteran of the genre, I tend not to play well with others... but I've managed to write some pretty massive projects regardless. I came to America in '93, and the idea of a programmer who knew more than one (or eight) language(s) seemed to be a revelation to the people I ran into, so life has not been dull...
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Dan Sutton wrote: I came to America in '93, and the idea of a programmer who knew more than one
(or eight) language(s) seemed to be a revelation to the people I ran into, so
life has not been dull...
This is a conversation I remember from 1997, at least five languages ago.
Me: "Dave, how many languages have you actually used in business?"
My boss: "Crap, I dunno, I lost count around ten."
Me: "Yeah, I count eight myself, but a couple more I can't remember if I used it just in grad school or on work projects as well."
That was before I had done any form of Web development. Not long before, I'd left a job which had a huge AS/400 shop, and most of these guys knew RPG, enough CL to get by, and nothing else at all.
Also, I remember when my girlfriend (later my wife) took FORTRAN, aced every test and paper homework assignment...then choked completely when it came time to write the program and test it. I've taught read-only SQL to clerks who cheerfully claimed to know nothing about PCs by first telling them that it really was easy, then I became the drillmaster from hell until they did EXACTLY what I told them, and they discovered that they were SQL geniuses (or, at least, they could now perform ad hoc queries to help with QA or support issues without having to call a programmer immediately). I probably should have been a teacher, but the expected income sucked so I became a programmer instead.
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I've done the same thing with SQL. Unfortunately (a) I suck as a teacher -- no patience; (b) they generally learn just about enough to get themselves into trouble... and then it's all my fault!
It's funny how people's brains work: a girlfriend of mine was excellent at debugging programs, but couldn't develop anything from scratch: something about the lateral thinking required -- it just wasn't there. She declared that women can't program because she couldn't. That appealed to me, somehow.
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cpkilekofp wrote: ANYONE can become a programmer without ever having to learn to write an explicit report detailing how and why their program works, and what its side effects could be if left in operation.
See, this is part of the reason Philosophers don't make good programmers - your basic assumption was WRONG!
I wasn't talking about 'writing a report about a program' - it was writing a 'reporting program' as in: Headers, Page #, Body (detail, totals), Footers. We actually had to code these by hand back in the dark ages....
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Frank Towle wrote: I wasn't talking about 'writing a report about a program' - it was writing a
'reporting program' as in: Headers, Page #, Body (detail, totals), Footers. We
actually had to code these by hand back in the dark ages....
ROTFLMAO...no. Your understanding of what I said is, er, WRONG. I wasn't talking about your guy, I was talking about what the average Philosophy and Psychology students have to do in order to get even halfway through their degree, that is, describe the workings of complex abstractions in detail in their native language. Now, I understand, there are a lot of computer science programs that include technical writing as a requirement, which I think is a major step in the right direction; one of the reasons I was made to suffer Experimental Psychology was so that, by the time I'd done the ninth or tenth experiment, I'd have learned how to write a passable description of a psychological experiment, i.e. one that would stand at least some chance of getting published in a peer-reviewed journal. Hmmm...these days, you could have had your Philosophical Phlower Child document the code, keeping him out of trouble, if you couldn't push him aside any other way - at least he'd probably know how to write in English.
And yes, I remember in one job we let the weak guy do the report programs - he turned out to be the saboteur by willful neglect, as every one of his programs was Y2K non-compliant even though we were writing this stuff in 1995. In every other job I had after that, the really weak guys didn't last long enough to contribute much - it was a much more competitive environment.
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