Steroid programming

So today I was sitting in the lab watching some Solaris code compile when Jonathon Lepolt walked through complaining about the heat in the office. I guess the air conditioning was acting flaky, although I wouldn’t know since the lab felt fine and I’d been there for hours. We got to talking and he jokingly posed the question of whether or not there were performance enhancing drugs in programming.

That’s not the typical tech question I run into every day.

I don’t know if he had just been reading about Barry Bond’s trainer legal troubles or if he is secretly juicing in preparation for the annual Seapine golf tournament. (Which he happens to be organizing, hmmmm.)

Anyhow, I responded that we probably don’t have a whole lot of Cream or Clear or HGH in this industry as you don’t often see programmers go all berserker with ‘roid rage.

Now caffeine usage is something else entirely (curse the Seapine free soda refrigerators) but I doubt it really makes that big a difference when writing code. Besides, how could you clean out caffeine from the software industry? That would be like banning riders in order to run a clean Tour de France.

Translation: It’s impossible.