exhaustive programming disorder

There are two types of individual who can suffer from exhaustive programming disorder, and they lie at the two opposite ends of the spectrum of people who make computers work.

The first is the obssessive hacker, coding (and maybe noding) through the night and on into the early hours of the morning, fuelled by the obligatory diet of Coke, caffeine and nicotine. This kind of EPD sufferer labours away in front of his screen for love, for the sheer pleasure that comes from altering this line just so, tweaking that function like that, and ultimately producing a product that millions will find useful.

The other EPD sufferer is probably far more common. It is the Corporate software engineer, stuck in his cubicle, trying to iron out the latest bugs in the mass-market, high-cost product that the marketing droids promised would be shipping last Tuesday. Possibly also fuelled by the same combination of junk food and cigarettes, this person's motivation is not pride in his work, or pleasure, or a will to do good for the community, but motivated instead by fear of unemployment, bankruptcy and homelessness.

I've swung between both of these roles at various points in my life, and know I think (at least I like to hope) that I've struck a happy medium -- I neither work too hard nor play too hard.

An extreme form of EPD can occur after a period of intense programming training, when the victim of the EPD applies his/her newly won knowledge on other areas in their lives, such as conversations with other people.

Not knowing whether or not a particular person takes floats or integers as input and whether you get a pointer-to-array-of-chars in return or a string object can be a real nuisance when you have to go find the man page for the individual in question.

Also, the decision to use either stdout or stderr can be a difficult one, especially under the influence of alcohol or other unknown substances.