"How did you learn programming? Were any schools of any use? Or maybe you didn't even bother with ending any schools :) ?"

IMO, programming is about problem solving skills. So in that sense, I first learned as a small child with these cubicle wooden blocks that had holes in them. Some holes were curved and others were straight through. You would build structures out of the blocks by stacking them together so the holes meet. Once you have finished, you would drop a marble into the top and wait for it to come out the bottom. Most of the time it would get stuck somewhere in the middle where you have no idea where your mistake was made. I think this taught me the most important aspect of programming: Perseverance
Either 2nd or 3rd grade our school had a lab of Apple 2's which they taught us Logo (that turtle program). After that we learned Apple BASIC through to 5th grade.
In middle school, I was mostly on my own. School was teaching word processing and spreadsheets while I was on BBS's in my spare time. I learned my first language on my own for the DOS terminal emulator Telix's scripting language called SALT. I wrote a war dialer and pissed a lot of people off in the middle of the night.
High school was mainly competing in BASIC and Pascal competitions, so I enrolled in an intro to C programming class at the local community college.
I went directly into COMPSCI in college, but I would say that after the basics, I didn't learn nearly as much as I did on the job, or in my spare time.

"What do you think is the most important skill every programmer should posses?"

Introversion. While not necessarily a skill, I think it is a vital trait to possess for developing the skills which make for a good programmer. Whether this is a trait which can be learned or not is something I don't know. A programmer is at their prime when their emotions are tied to what they help create.

"Do you think mathematics and/or physics are an important skill for a programmer? Why?"

Neither. It might happen that someone who has, by nurture, developed a strong sense of problem solving that there is a correlation, but I don't think there is a causal relationship. Obviously it is a different situation when a programmer is solving a math or physics related problem, otherwise the problems encountered in normal programming would come naturally to someone who has developed good problem solving skills.

"What do you think will be the next big thing in computer programming? X-oriented programming, y language, quantum computers, what?"

That depends on what is considered "big". I don't see anything in this area until programs are capable of creatively writing programs, and eventually reproducing in this manner. At this point competing programs will be fighting over resources and natural selection will continue on its way. The exponential time frame of such an event would be days to seconds. The outcome of such a process is sometimes called a temporal technological singularity.

"If you had three months to learn one relatively new technology, which one would You choose?"

Three months isn't enough to learn anything important such as organic chemistry or nano-technology. I'd probably continue researching web-based deliberation techniques in order to try to affect real life politics.

"What do you think makes some programmers 10 or 100 times more productive than others?"

As before, some programmers are introverted. Whether it is nature or nurture, I can't answer, but an introverted individual spends most of their time doing what others do only when they are clocked in at their job. Compound that effort every day over years, and you have a significant difference in programming productivity.

"What are your favourite tools (operating system, programming/scripting language, text editor, version control system, shell, database engine, other tools you can't live without) and why do you like them more than others?"

OS: Linux
Language: C++
Editor: vim
SCM: subversion (possibly git.. not sure)
Shell: bash (see Linux)
SQL: agnostic
I've learned my lesson about vendor-lockin. That's why I don't use proprietary tools. Until copyright is abolished, I will continue using free-software licenses as a rebelion against, IMO, the antiquated and anti-productive notion of copyright as things exist today. I use vim because I prefer its modal behavior and how the major command keys are layed out spatially. C++ is extremely efficient while maintaining its expressive power.

W. Richard Steven's "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment". I really like his side-notes about quirks and bits of history about different implementations.

Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence" I'm kinda cheating here.. he does have some programming in the book, which I based my chess engine off of.

Computer Survey 2007-08-01