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by jboggan 416 days ago
I have found a fairly interesting correlation between people who are good at learning programming and people who are good at English spelling bees. Something about holding a lot of anecdotes and esoteric rule exceptions when performing an otherwise algorithmic process.
3 comments

Are you a teacher and/or someone that runs spelling bees or otherwise someone that has done the proper statistics to distinguish this correlation with generalised intelligence. Just wondering where you get this anecdata from?
They get it from being an engineer!
I had a CS prof who couldn't spell to save his life and caught a lot of good-natured flak about it from his students.
Makes sense to me; I've always been a naturally good English speller. My brain just knows how to store and retrieve this type of data, which has a high correlation with e.g. CLI interfaces and their idiosyncratic command structures.
I can’t decide if you’ve cheekily included the classic homophonic there-error. This isn’t technically an issue with English spelling, but I think you intended to communicate that CLI interfaces have idiosyncratic command structures, not that they are idiosyncratic structures themselves. If I’ve been taken in by pedant-bait, I apologize.
Lol, nope, just a case of my fingers deciding they know what I'm typing, or possibly autocorrect "fixing" something that was already correct. (I don't know why but the Android GBoard has been introducing crazy numbers of wrong homophones recently.)
I'm a terrible speller; it's taken me ten years of typing "ammend" to learn its proper spelling. It also sort of goes against the "programmers are lazy" meme: why memorize what a computer can detect and correct?