Your link to http://www.designobserver.com/archives/011848.html seems to be broken, which is as shame as I really wanted to follow that up. I've said for years that one of the interesting things about programming is you rarely just program, you normally program about something so you always learn new stuff. I've certainly seen situations where otherwise decent programmers proposed stuff that just wouldn't work, and if they had a better knowledge of the field in question they would have know that.