“Werry good poer o’ suction, Sammy,” said Mr Weller the elder, looking into the pot, when his first-born had set it down half empty. “You’d ha’ made an uncommon fine oyster, Sammy, if you’d been born in that station o’ life,”Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

One of the great pleasures of programming in a team is the pub lunch. It is something I always relish, particularly on a Friday, for the refreshments, the gossip and the companionship. I thought that this ancient ritual was an international one until I worked for a while in Japan, and discovered to my horror that it was soft drinks only until the sun went down. At first I thought this was due to their abstemiousness until I saw the propensity of the Japanese engineer or programmer for consuming the stuff once the sun had dropped.

Nevertheless I always wondered whether there was a moral dimension to celebrating the end of the working week with a couple of pints of best Bitter. Is it true that one’s capacity for work drops after the Amber Nectar has hit the bloodstream? I have always doubted it. Do careless errors slip into ones’ code after the beverage hits the bladder? My own experience tells me not. Once the warm glow of the hops descends on my soul, I feel calmer, and more confident. and less distractible. My best ever code has, I have always considered, been written with a jar of Stout in one hand and a cigar in the other.

There will be some, particularly those with the cold grey ice of Puritanism in their souls, who will click through their teeth and protest that I would be better off drinking water and breathing in fresh invigorating air.

This should be put to the scientific test. I have of course done the best I can but my results are merely indicative. I have conscientiously plotted the average number of times I have hit the compile button before a stored procedure has compiled without errors, against the number of half-pints of Beer I have consumed. The data was collected over a period of a month. The results, for what they are worth are:

The problem with these results is that they take no account of the ‘Placebo Effect’. My error-rate may be more closely related to my subconscious will to come up with the result I want. For a controlled experiment, a whole range of programmers, selected by random numbers and balanced so as to represent a true sample of the population of programmers, should be given both real beer and an alcohol-free ‘Placebo’ beverage that is indistinguishable from it. It should be done at various times of day with a full range of database tasks. It is an indictment of the poor state of academic psychology that such a task has not yet been undertaken. Of course, for all I know, a PHd thesis may already lie neglected in some university library with the truth already firmly established

Should the community of database developers and DBAs unite to determine this issue once and for all? If it can be proved beyond all doubt that a good beer actually improves ones programming skills then maybe one can claim the cost of purchase against tax?

Your views and comments would be most welcome.

If it be true that I do think
There are five reasons we should drink;
Good wine, a friend, or being dry,
or lest we should be by-and-by
or any other reason whyHenry Aldrich, Dean of Christ Church Oxford