While I don't doubt that more screen real estate helps most programmers, it's not a hard-and-fast rule.
In the past few years my work environment would change from day to day (different offices and coffee shops) so I didn't have the luxury of lugging around large monitors and instead worked exclusively from my laptop's small display. As a result of this and my dislike for Mac OSX's default window navigation I set up my own hotkeys for switching between my most frequent applications (documented here: http://techiferous.com/2009/12/streamlining-your-workflow-wi... ).
Now when I am presented with an option of hooking up more monitors to my laptop I decline because my inter-app workflow is so streamlined on (and optimized for) my tiny laptop screen.
In the past few years my work environment would change from day to day (different offices and coffee shops) so I didn't have the luxury of lugging around large monitors and instead worked exclusively from my laptop's small display. As a result of this and my dislike for Mac OSX's default window navigation I set up my own hotkeys for switching between my most frequent applications (documented here: http://techiferous.com/2009/12/streamlining-your-workflow-wi... ).
Now when I am presented with an option of hooking up more monitors to my laptop I decline because my inter-app workflow is so streamlined on (and optimized for) my tiny laptop screen.