In my career as a web developer I have worked on accounting systems three or four times now. At one point, it occurred to me that the quirky feature of Common

In my career as a web developer I have worked on accounting systems three or four times now. At one point, it occurred to me that the quirky feature of Common Lisp's FORMAT that prints numbers as English names was very likely put there to make it easier to print checks for payroll! I have often reflected on how it would have helped me if I had been required, or even merely strongly encouraged, to take an "Introduction to Accounting for Programmers" class, that would discuss payment processing, invoices, accounts receivable, even how to store dates and times (UTC for the win, darn it!) -- if more developers understood these things from the outset, I strongly suspect a lot of systems would be more robust than they are now!