[Tell It Right]

I wonder how much this includes people who are on edge of the autism spectrum who are today diagnosed as autistic, but in the past wouldn't have been.

I've heard more than one fellow programmer joke that we couldn't do our job well without being a little autistic. LOL

[Reily]

Over the past 20-25 years they have expanded the definition as to what is autism. It’s now not one disease showing one set of characteristics it’s now a “spectrum”. So naturally there would be an increase in the number of autism cases. What I haven’t seen are any statistics where that is normalized out. Without doing that it’s difficult to honestly say if there’s been an increase and if so by how much.