From personal experience: no. I bought a MacBook Air in January. It's very ideal for travelling, due to its small size and weight. However, it squeezes nearly

From personal experience: no. I bought a MacBook Air in January. It's very ideal for travelling, due to its small size and weight. However, it squeezes nearly the same amount of pixels as a 13.3" MacBook Pro in a 11.8" display. So, if your eyes are a bit tired, it becomes annoying to read code. Also, the CPU is much slower (even after this refresh) than the MacBook Pro. If you use compiled languages or do a lot of data processing, this is annoying. I returned my Air to my Apple Reseller recently, and purchased a MacBook Pro (as I had before). It's fast and a readable screen. Since you are a programmer, you'll probably enjoy a MacBook, given OS X's UNIX underpinnings.