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.
The idea of performance enhancing drugs for programming seemed interesting, so I let myself go wondering through the land of google. As with all things google, the results are plenty.
One of the more ‘interesting’ results when looking for “drugs for programmers” was this site that talked about how the Illuminati used drugs to program people. This wasn’t quite what I was looking for.
Next on the list was The Programmers Stone (a Philospher’s Stone for coders, perhaps?) With topics such as “Thinking about Thinking”, “Literary Criticism and Design Patterns” and “Physics Textbook as Cultural Construct”, my brain was starting to wrinkle, which according to neuroscientists, is a good thing. And then there is a section that includes both Richard Feynman and Teilhad de Chardin. I was surprised that there wasn’t a reference to
an Eternal Golden Braid.
No search on drugs to improve mental performance is complete without mention of Provigil (modafinil). You can follow this one on your own.
Not to be outdone, second only to google in the amount of relevant hits for data is Amazon. If you can search for it, they will find a way to sell it to you. Smart Drugs
Now, I just need to find the suppliers of HGH so I can regain my youth.
Comment by Michael — August 30, 2006 @ 9:24 am