I get the impression that Jeff is a much better blogger than programmer. And he's not my favorite blogger. I say this not just from his self-deprecation, which

I get the impression that Jeff is a much better blogger than programmer. And he's not my favorite blogger. I say this not just from his self-deprecation, which I've learned not to take at face value. But these weird non-sequitur "questions" he comes up with for article titles suggests he is not at an adult level of proficiency with his craft. Asking whether programmers "should be 'mathematically inclined'" is like asking whether movie directors "should be visually creative." They damned well better be, or go find something to do with their lives that is not a waste of their and their audience's time. When I was, oh, twenty or so, I used to be one of those systems programmers who thought that the fanciest data structure I'd ever need was a hash table. If you write real code, that other human beings use, one of those humans will eventually use it in a way you didn't anticipiate. And in that use, N will suddenly be large! The user will expect your code to work, and with reasonable resource consumption. "Mathematically uninclined" programmers' code will die with large N, and they're not "inclined" to fix it.