Oh, goodness, this one's easy for me. I wanted to be an economist and stopped taking economics classes at a local community college after I had taken all that they offered. One of the many interesting things about economics that I learned applied to programming was the following axiom:

It is always cheaper and faster to prevent a problem than to clean it up.

Any doctor will tell you that a vaccine is better than treating measles. Any environmental engineer can easily demonstrate the preventing pollution is cheaper than cleaning up the after-effects. Buying your spouse roses is cheaper than a divorce (look, just trust me on that one).

So how does that affect programming? You'll notice in all of the above examples that a little bit of extra work beforehand is required to enjoy the benefits. But many parents don't bother to get their children vaccinated. Many people don't bother to recycle. Many husbands have never bought their wife roses. Here's the relation to programming: how many programs have you seen where someone just hacked something together quickly and hoped it would work. 'strict' isn't used, globals are everywhere and no error checking is apparent. Such programs are usually a mess.

I don't know why it's so difficult to convince programmers to take the time to do it right, but then, I saw this all the time in economics. People are lazy (myself included!). We just don't want to bother to do things right the first time because it's extra work.

Cheers,
Ovid

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• Marketing teach me a lot about User Interaction.
  See how salesmen induce a behaviour and imagine how it could be use to induce correct behaviour if applied to a GUI.
  
• History teach me a lot about mistake of the past...
  
• See how the linguist's knowledge of Larry helped him to design a GREAT language...
  (His Ideas are simple but he was the first to link so closely spoken languages and computer ones
  (please don't tell me about COBOL or LOGO they are obviously COMPUTER languages))
  
• Even Sci-Fi teach me a lot (the Bene-Gesserit, the General Semantics, etc, are REALY good things to learn)
  

Robert Anton Wilson said something along the lines of this (can't find the real quote online now):

The Ultimate Intelligence Test:

• If you are feeling that the world is bigger, brighter, more enjoyable and fuller of opportunities with every day, you are getting more intelligent.
• If you are feeling that the world is smaller, darker, less enjoyable and lacking opportunities with every day, you are getting dumber.

For me, this is one of the most therapeutic sentences that you can give to "rationalists" (like most programmers are).

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com

I took a broad mix of Math, Economics and English in college and I think they each gave me problem solving tools. While Math may be the more obvious choice, the Economics classes gave me some practical grounding in gathering data (and in how silly the results can be if data is gathered selectively or if assumptions are made early in the process). A literature background will remind you that it's all been done before, if nothing else :)

Some of the best programmers I've known had no formal background in computer science. And some of the worst were CS majors, but I won't make assumptions :)

I played piano for about 10 years. What I got from that was, amongst other things, the ability to concentrate, manual dexterity, being able to process multiple tasks in parallel and also the sense of "art".

Playing music requires you to be in a second state of mind, you often have to be very concentrated, you use both your hands and your brain, a bit like when you are in a coding session.

Oh, and another thing helped a lot, to learn Perl and other computer stuff, that was learning English. But then, it might have gone the other way around: I learned English because of the computers. I've always been attracted by computers, and the urge to use and understand them drove me to learn English much faster.

I think so much could be related this way, I think the way the brain works is by doing links between things you know, and the more you know the more you can learn, and the easier any problem you will encounter will be to solve.

Guillaume