I strongly disagree. Some good programmers are arrogant, but then again so are some bad ones. The best ones realize that they don't -- and can't -- know it all, and they make allowances for it.
Edsger Dijkstra even made humility the point of a paper he delivered at a Turing Award lecture, said paper being entitled "The Humble Programmer." His argument was that most of the art/science of programming centers around trying to compensate for our finite cranial capacity. This is indisputably true. As Steve McConnell puts it, "The people who are the best at programming are the people who realize how small their brains are. They are humble. The prople who are the worst at programming are the people who refuse to accept the fact that their brains aren't equal to the task." That may be a different sense of the word "humility" than you were discussing, but I think it is relevant. In more practical terms, arrogant programmers all too frequently become prima donnas, which often affords them the opportunity to become the best programmer nobody wants to work with. Jon <snip> 'Humility'? Anyone entering a new field has perforce much to learn from some of its experienced denizens, but humility should be short-lived. No good programmer I have every known was at all humble, and the great ones were/are well aware of their abilities, even [some few of them] arrogant about their skills. </snip> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
