hm. Correlation and causation aren't the same thing. You can correlate good programmers with all kinds of things, but that does not mean that those things mak

hm. Correlation and causation aren't the same thing. You can correlate good programmers with all kinds of things, but that does not mean that those things make good programmers, necessarily. ...but, you know. There's probably a pretty strong causation in some cases (eg. write code in spare time, play music, speak a second language, believe in TDD, whatever), and if you're trying to be a better programmer, looking at the things that other good programmers do is the right way to get better at it. Some correlations are obviously stupid though (gender, politics) and I'd be vastly more interested in data mining life-analytics of good programmers for interesting useful correlations (eg. play sport? hand-eye coordination? memory? write c++ for fun? know how to write assembly?) rather than just saying, well, all correlations are probably arbitrary and don't have any relation to causation. Pity there isn't really any way to get hold of that sort of raw data to play with~