EntriesFor the past four years I have been engaged pretty heavily in developing a computer application. A typical day, seven days a week, finds me at work shortly after I’ve finished reading the morning paper, and still programming ten hours later.
During this period I have grown familiar with trained and experienced Mac developers. I follow their blogs and tweets, and meet up with them at conferences. As I continue to know and understand developers, I find myself comparing them to the other profession that I know fairly well: lawyers.
I practiced law for twenty years or so. Happily, I am now fully recovered. The lawyers that I knew were without exception trained in the law (well, they had three years of law school) and many were quite highly experienced. You might think that with all that education, and all that mental exercise, lawyers as a whole would be fairly smart. Maybe they are. All I know is, Mac programmers are smarter.
Most of the Mac developers I know have a computer science background, but it is not at all unusual to find one who, like myself, is self-taught. One cannot say that programmers are smarter than lawyers because programmers are better educated. Yet on the whole, when I think of the conversations I’ve had with members of the two professions, the programmers seem altogether more articulate, better informed, and more adept at reasoning to their own conclusions. I had much rather talk to programmers, on any subject, than to lawyers.
As for myself, well into middle age, my logical faculties seem to be increasing. I’m slower, but sharper than I ever was. The thought struck me this morning when I remembered a dream I had last night. I was running along a beach, being chased by a pack of angry savages. I outran them and paused to ponder their next move. “Spears and arrows,” I thought. “What can I do for protection against the incipient barrage of spears and arrows?” I spied a thicket, and crawled into it as the projectiles became tangled in the brush over my head. Then I thought, “They know where I am, and will track me by my footprints. How can I escape from this spot without leaving footprints?” Then I remembered the beach. “I’ll swim!”
Whether the pursuers would have seen me in the water was left unresolved. What is clear is that in this dream, I stopped to reason things out. This dream is not at all unusual. I realized that these days my dreams are more likely to place me in a situation where I have to think my way out, than to place me in a situation where I merely observe events.
Is that a consequence of the type of thinking I’ve been doing lately? I certainly never had such dreams when I was practicing law.
And here, I posit, is why. We expect computers always to produce the same result for the same input. There are few, if any, anomalies; if something unexpected happens, then it’s a bug and we fix it. The operating system or the network might not provide the result I expected, but it will always produce that result, and once I know the result I can deal with it.
In law, anomalies are commonplace. Two judges, both competent (just imagine, if you will), might rule differently on precisely identical questions. Tomorrow they might rule differently. I remember one day early in my career when a lawyer in motion hour made the same argument I was going to make in my case. He won. When my case was called, I made the same argument and lost.
I think that if judges were as predictable as computers, I would have been the sharpest lawyer in town.
Over time my professional judgment improved, but I never worked in a cycle where I proposed a solution, evaluated the result, and proposed another solution until I got it right. Many times I knew beyond question that a proposed law was unconstitutional, but no court in the state would be willing to strike it down. I was a better lawyer for knowing that, but not any smarter.
I learn more in one day of programming than I learned in six months of practicing law. I learn how to think through problems and how to reach the true solution rather than just finding something I can argue with a straight face.
This entire essay is mere subjective speculation, and I am blithely unobligated to cite corroborative facts. Form your own opinion whether programmers are, on the whole, smarter than lawyers. For me, there’s no doubt. You’re a lawyer? Nice to meet you, but I really have to be going. You write Mac software? Come on over, I’ll buy you a beer.