Do drugs help programmers?

Can marijuana, LSD or other psychedelic drugs help programmers write better code?

By Phil Johnson

November 07, 2012, 11:34 AM —

Is this the key to better code - or just the munchies?

REUTERS/Andres Stapff

Election Day 2012 has come and gone and, aside from President Obama and his supporters, one of the happiest groups has to be marijuana smokers. Pot smokers are by definition, a pretty happy bunch anyways, but they must be extra pleased that Colorado and Washington passed ballot initiatives to legalize the recreational use of it. My own state of Massachusetts passed an initiative to legalize marijuana for medical purposes. Note to self: see primary care physician about my “achy back.”

Yesterday’s big wins for Mary Jane, of course, ~~begs~~ raises the obvious question: what does this mean for programmers?

Ok, maybe it’s not such an obvious question, but I ask because there’s been chatter recently in programmer discussion forums about whether drugs can actually help produce better code.

This discussion quickly gets bogged down in the weeds - er, details. What type of drugs are we talking about? Marijuana? LSD? Cocaine? Caffeine? And what do you mean by “better code”? Fewer bugs? Code that solves a problem in a more elegant fashion? Better (or at least more entertaining) comments?

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Phil Johnson is a writer and editor for ITworld.com, after having survived 17 years in the corporate wild as a software/web developer, technical lead and project manager. Along the way he also used to write monologue jokes for David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon and Jay Leno.

In his spare time these days, when he's not chauffeuring his daughters to and from school, lessons and Justin Bieber movies (ugh), he enjoys drawing cartoons, tweeting about his life and taking pictures of cranes.