Does a person's day-to-day neatness (outside of programming) relate to quality and organization in programming?
- by jiceo
Before anyone jumps into any conclusion, I had a discussion with a friend (who's not a programmer at all) about the relationship between a person's neatness habit and the degree of neatness generally shown in works by the same person.
This led me to think about this situation:
Let's imagine you knew a programmer whose house was very messy. This person's lifestyle is messy by nature. On his desk there are books, papers, STUFF, piled everywhere including on the floor, mixed with dirty clothing, with no obvious organization at all. If you asked him to find a book he hasn't touched for at least a week from the cluster of chaos, he would take at least an hour to do so. How likely is it that he will produce very clean, consistent, and organized code that other people can use?
Are there CS legends that are/were notoriously messy in day-to-day habits?
