Dan, did you read your posting before you hit send? Your argument is simply an ad hominem followed by a supposedly conclusive statement. If this is an appropriate display of your logic, I'd hate to see what happens to one of your programs when it hits an 'if-else' statement. Let's begin. 'Philosophies are methods of restricting the way one's brain works.' Now, Dan when you make statements like this, it is good to include at least one line of justification. Nevertheless, there seems to be some ignorance on your part about what philosophy is. You seem to be suggesting that it is a belief or attitude like 'hey man, my philosophy is love everyone'. The word philosophy is greek for 'love of wisdom'. The subject matter is meta in nature. It is interpreting and understanding beliefs. Second, you should never make arguments by analogy since the analogy is never precise. You could have picked that up in a logic course in college. Finally everyone has a 'philosophy' (that's the naive sense in which you're using the word), Dan. But I fail to see this connection: studying a philosophy --> wanting a philosophy that suits (vague) one --> bad programmers. You wrote, Dan. I only distilled it. Guess that BA is good for something after all.

So, let me get this straight- you hire one kid with a philosophy degree that sucks and that implies all programmers with philosophy degrees suck? Now, that's questionable logic! Or are you suggesting that an employer just shouldn't hire some one to do a job that he hasn't been formally trained to do? If that's the case, then why single out people with philosophy backgrounds? I have a BA in philosophy and an MS in computer science. Prima facie, my philosophy training may seem irrelevant to software dev, but in fact it enhances my dynamic skills. I'm willing to bet that you imagine the philosopher to be some idealistic nitwit who sits in dingy coffee shacks and smokes hand-rolled tobacco while pondering the meaning of life. But in fact, philosophy, especially contemporary analytical philosophy, is a stringent discipline exalting logic and reasoning above all things. If this kid knowingly compromised the rules of logic, then he does not have a philosophical background at all. Any first year philosophy major learns that the foundation of meaning and understanding rest on the shoulders of unyielding logic. Another thing these 18 year-old children learn that you seemed to miss is that- there exist an X does not imply that for all X.