Indeed, if you want to do just simple programming in your life.
Psychedelics are an intense way of doing this.
The best programmers in the world -- those who work together to solve the most complex and aggressive problems asked of the human mind -- are those who come to work every day, solve problems, and write code, and go home. They don't spend their time justifying "lifehacks" like taking LSD for that extra "edge" over other programmers.
How do you know? That is what I asked, and you haven't answered me. You're making assertions about the best programmers in the world that you can't possibly back up. How do you know that some of them don't take LSD?
They won't be exceptional programmers because of this, but being a professional and still being curious is not something hardly imaginable.
It's about wanting to know more and to expand your horizons for their own sake. Look at some of the "best programmers in the world". Lots of crazy beards in that group, right?
Either that or you've discovered some property of 'complex' problems that precludes the use of LSD to solve them. Otherwise, yes, it is less true (i.e. baseless and false).
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html
"But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors."
Do you think that perfection, that stability, in the face of lives at risk for every mistake, is a suitable place to suggest that taking LSD could make them better? These are the best programmers in the world, by many standards. And they're not writing node.js servers and map-reduce queries, they're using billions of dollars of hardware to achieve manned space flight. And they don't take LSD.
"It's strictly an 8-to-5 kind of place -- there are late nights, but they're the exception. The programmers are intense, but low-key. Many of them have put in years of work either for IBM (which owned the shuttle group until 1994), or directly on the shuttle software. They're adults, with spouses and kids and lives beyond their remarkable software program.
That's the culture: the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups. It may not be sexy, it may not be a coding ego-trip -- but it is the future of software. When you're ready to take the next step -- when you have to write perfect software instead of software that's just good enough -- then it's time to grow up."
Says who? The article says 260 people worked on that part of the code. I'm sure they're all security-cleared and background-checked up the wazoo, but i'd wager that more than a handful of those 260 have had psychedelic experiences at some point.
Do you have any experience of the challenges of spaceflight software to demonstrate that all problems are of "sub-mind-bending" difficulty?
EDIT: and among other things that I'd consider important to mention, there are significant robotics challenges, autonomous behavior and decision making (with associated problems in formal model verification), along with the general high degree of fault tolerance required in just about every software (and hardware) subsystem. I think many of the hardest problems in CS can be found in the spaceflight domain.
Such a broad statement strikes me as saying something akin to 'I can prove there is no God.' As much as I believe it to be true and want to see it proved, I just can't say for sure.