You can tell a programmer from a regular person by the way they ask and answer questions. Programmers give answers and ask questions like computers do: technically correct, but often totally irrelevant and beside the point.
For example, if you ask a regular person “do you know where Hynes Convention Center is?” they’ll try to give you directions. Programmers are likely to say “Yes.” They may occasionally elaborate, and describe the location. If they give you directions, they will have strange and often frightening details, such as longitude, cardinal direction, and the amount of time it will take, depending on whether you are travelling by African or European swallow. Or, in a meeting designed to tell new employees of a large corporation about insider trading laws, they will ask questions which do not apply to them (“If I were a foreign resident, what would the tax implications for…”) or will pick at inconsistencies in the ways that the rules are explained, despite the fact that the rules themselves are consistent.
It can be infuriating until you realize that these are the people whose thought process is what makes your world tick. They are able to see things in a way that you don’t, are able to imagine all the corner cases, the exceptions. Things that you take as common sense appear to them as arbitrary rules which have to be learned, because, frankly, that’s what they are. They’re just aware of it more than you are.
Secretly Ironic 