[heroHACK17]

Not OP, but I have ADHD and would love to chime in here. I love programming on meds and I hate programming on meds. Meds connect the dots, but meds also over-engineer everything. Then the meds wear off and I am stuck with a huge solution and I have no idea what I just did.

[esperent]

As a person without ADHD that sounds weirdly similar to my experience of studying or coding on amphetamines (from brief experiments in college that I quickly decided were not worth it). Is there actually any difference between ADHD meds and speed?

[dec0dedab0de]

Depends on the meds, but Adderall is a combination of different amphetamines and dextroamphetamines. Some of which are added just to make it uncomfortable if you take too much.

The greatly simplified idea is that people with adhd have trouble using parts of their brain at the time they need to. So by increasing all brain activity the parts that are normally diminished are about normal. The side effect is that all the rest of the parts are amped up.

[titanomachy]

This isn't quite right. Adderall is a 3:1 mixture of dextroamphetamine and levoamphetamine. These are different enantiomers (configurations) of the amphetamine molecule. The two molecules have subtly different effects in the body, but as far as I know, neither is added to "make it uncomfortable if you take too much".

[dec0dedab0de]

Fair enough. A doctor basically explained it to me like that over a decade ago, and I took their word for it. Which is uncharacteristic of me to just take someone's word for something, and repeat it.

[acidbaseextract]

I had a coworker with ADHD and I'm pretty sure he was prescribed stimulants although he was discreet about it. His patterns of focus were idiosyncratic, and occasionally he wrote code that just oozed "hopped up on addy" stylistically — particularly spurious and superfluous abstractions.