I've never been formerly diagnosed, but I'm pretty certain I'm on it somewhere. A decade or so ago, one person, who was a coworker of my wife's, and whom I had met and conversed with - without any prompting or explanation from my wife - gave her a copy of "Mozart and the Whale" to give to me.

I have yet to watch it.

But I've always had certain obsessions: one is things moving in circles - windmills, gears, whatever - all fascinate me; interestingly, even abstract things likes loops and recursion, such as in programming, are easy for me to understand and utilize. Mazes are another thing (which is almost opposite of a loop). Fractals, too.

Recently I sat for a couple of hours coding a bookmarklet to remove extraneous portions of instructables so they could be saved to a PDF or otherwise, without including all the "cruft". It just kinda "sucked me in" after I was trying to clean up one I had just browsed to; at the end, I had to sit for a bit to figure out "now what did I just make this thing for - ah, yes - this tab over here".

My mother (RIP), who was of a different generation (I can't explain it easily - number one, I was adopted, rather late by my parents, who were in the 40s at the time - but technically they fell into an "in-between" generation somewhere between "the greatest generation" and "baby boomers" - much like how GenX is today - of which I am a part), always described me as looking, or being, "sour". It wasn't until my adult years that she likely meant I had a particular RBF, maybe a blank or poor affect that resulted in my countenance being "non-agreeable".

Even today, my wife will sometimes ask me if I am mad at her, because I look or seem angry - when I'm not. It's just the way I look. I have this look of seriousness or something. My current employer/boss has noted the same thing about me; he has often said that he doesn't know how I will react or respond to certain things, and that sometimes I'm surprising in that regard.

Something you may have noticed here - or elsewhere if you've seen my other postings - is my manner of writing, and likely speaking; a coworker of mine once told me that I speak like how Lisp is written (what he meant was that I typically talk parenthetically, nesting explanations and anecdotes within each other down a chain, but that everything was related, and I would eventually "pop things off the stack" and come back up the chain to the original discussion).

All of this underscores why I've never been good in social situations, among other things, but my wife has been very helpful and understanding in that regard (yet, she still has problems with my countenance at times).

As far as your experience with other programmers - well, I admit that at times I can be "that guy"; arrogance and other mal-traits do surface at times. That said, I'm also the first to apologize when I know I am or have been in the wrong. I also make sure not to let whatever led to that situation happen again. Most of the time, though (except when hubris, arrogance, or stupidity attacks me), I have learned that the best way to avoid issues is to not say anything at all - I am often known as "the quiet one" because of that (I then will often play the a-hole and remind them of what neighbors always say about serial killers and mass murderers)...