The autistic programmer

It seems to me that developers can be far more stubborn than any other phyllum of worker I have known.

Not only do they get set in their ways, they get wedged in their ways, so tightly and so inextricably, that any attempt to dislodge them will end in disaster. Example: just try to get a developer who writes his functions in camelcase to use all lower case.Instead of writing function

myFunction()

you require that he writes:

function my_function() 

Try and tell a programmer to make that kind of a life-altering change, and then sit back, because, if you've never seen the Exorcist, you're about to see it now. You're about to see heads spinning 360 degrees and pea soup flying in every direction.

As a consequence of these - ahem - nuances, developers get an awful rap. They are resistant to change. They're surly. They're arrogant. They have massive egos.

But it's not really true. Few developers have big egos. For the most part, they have fragile egos, if they have egos at all.

The typical developer doesn't think massively of himself. He can barely make eye contact. And therein lies the root of the problem.

Developers are not arrogant and egotistic. Developers, for the most part, aren't even geeky nerds with low social skills. Developers are, for the most part, autistic.

The world of programming is a honeypot, attracting Aspbergers' like they were flies.

Keep that in mind the next time you are about to launch into a tirade with some junior developer who flouts convention when he puts braces on their own line.