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Comment by Natsu | Hacker News Reader

Computers themselves are very pedantic, so we wouldn't be very good at using them if we weren't good at being technically correct. The compiler won't forgive you for missing a semicolon or mismatched parentheses.

So I strongly suspect that our programming ability is related to our capacity for being pedantic, as annoying as that may be socially.

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The capacity for being pedantic isn't the socially annoying part; rather, it is the curious unwillingness of some nerds to exercise restraint that is.

So I strongly suspect that our programming ability is related to our capacity for being pedantic, as annoying as that may be socially.

Just like all tall people are good at basketball? Being a pedantic nit has nothing to do with one's ability to write code.

Regardless, this is a pretty cool story.

But people that are good at basketball do tend to be tall, and people that are good at programming quite possibly tend to be pedantic nits.

The inverse isn't always true. Correlation isnt causation, more than two points to a line, etc etc.

I never said that one caused the other, only that pedantry is necessary when writing correct computer programs.

Huge bugs can come from small mistakes. The bug that tripped up Colin and ended up as a story on HN a while back was nothing more than a missing ++ in his code. Yet that tiny mistake screwed up the security of his cryptography.

"capacity for being pedantic"

I doubt one would get very far in any kind of serious debugging session without the ability to be pedantic. It doesn't mean we can't judge the time and place for it.

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