We can argue all we want about these things, and try to reason as logically as possible, and write entire essays on the topic - ultimately, if we want meaningfu

We can argue all we want about these things, and try to reason as logically as possible, and write entire essays on the topic - ultimately, if we want meaningful discourse, we need data on programmer skill vs first language learned. My first serious language was z80 assembly, followed by C, and I have a voice in my head that, much like the author, says "of course someone who's learned assembly/C first will be a better programmer". But we need to fight back those instincts, because they are not based on data. Sure, they seem logical, and we can make eloquent parallels with stick shift driving, and we can all remember that one programmer who started as a Python programmer and totally sucked, so of course learning Python first doesn't make great programmers - but at the end of the day, we need data. It's all pseudo-science otherwise, and it's not any better reasoning than pop psychology. It's kind of ironic how hackers, usually extremely data driven people, tend to fall into these fallacies just as easily as others as soon as it stops pertaining to engineering. We wouldn't want to debug a program or assess its performance without any hard evidence, so why do we do that when it comes to thinking about other things? Some of pg's essays come to mind, e.g. the one about smart kids being unpopular and miserable in high school [0]. He might be right, he might be wrong - I don't know. But I do know that building an entire social theory just based on your hunches and own subjective experience is not scientific. It's very tempting to want to do so - we're very logical people, and in many cases in our jobs we can derive objective truth just from the power of deductive reasoning - but we need to fight those instincts when it comes to reasoning about fuzzier systems, like society or other human beings. The idea exposed by the author is mentally pleasing - many of us are tempted to agree because it feels right, and the author's reasoning seems right. But there are no correlations between mentally pleasing, elegant ideas and their correctness. It was once mentally pleasing to think that the Sun went around the Earth, or that electricity was a fluid. EDIT: as for the claim that stick shifts make for better drivers, then why do countries with 99.9% of cars having manual transmissions (e.g. France) have comparable, or worse, accident rates per kilometer driven per person compared to the US? The fact that this is the case should at least cause one to pause rather than blindly assert "stick shifts make better drivers". [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html