Meaningless, Programming, and Innate Affinity

Clay Shirky guest post on BoingBoing called "Comfort with meaninglessness the key to good programmers". The comments are filled with "my programming language r0x0rZ" and suchlike, but it's another perspective on the often-espounded (not least by yours truly) theory that being an excellent programmer is an innate characteristic. You can be trained to be a software engineer of some skill (and large firms are stocked with hundreds of the type, who are trained to implement business logic in a programming language, or in pixel-pushing GUIs), but there appears to be something innate in making a programmer.

Or, as I was recently told, "so what you're saying is that all of you are naturally freaks."