[dandrews]

Some pilots are just drivers - I'd certainly rather ride with the former, given the choice!

While it's tempting to characterize some programmers as just coders, that sounds pejorative and wouldn't be very charitable of me. So instead I'll distinguish programmers as tool makers and tool users. I know which one of those I'd put my faith in too, all things equal.

No offense intended... at all! I don't grok monads either, but in my world (mainframe stuff) Haskell doesn't register. If I used monads though I'd surely be driven to understand what's going on under the hood.

Forgive me another tangential OT story, an anecdote I read in a magazine many years ago. A man was spending a Saturday afternoon puttering around in his back yard while the family's hound slept on the back porch. The man called the dog, who then roused and put his nose to the ground, retracing all the steps his master had taken that afternoon until he finally reached the man. "The dog didn't give a damn about coming to me" the man growled, "He just wanted to know how I got here."

Hee! That's me.