My programmer steals my idea

Or use you.

Those people saying NDA's etc don't work are probably the ones who hire some Russian programmer for an affiliate script and expect to pay $50.

This has been an ongoing problem in this industry, everyone wants everything for nothing. If you hired a US programmer, paid the money that programmers *SHOULD* make, and backed that up with NDA's and such, you typically will have no problems and will have the ability to go after them.

If you don't have the money to pay a programmer the right amount of money to do a job properly or have the money to have an attorney draft and NDA, then you probably shouldn't be in business for yourself or you need to learn how to code.

Even if your programmer didn't do it, someone else would have. Maybe even one of his friends. When I was first getting really into coding I wrote a script that did the same thing as secretadmirer.com. I started selling it for $75 per copy. It wasn't more than 2 weeks later that I got a C&D from secretadmirer.com's attorney.

I've got an attorney in the family so I called her in a panic. Naturally she told me that they couldn't stop me as long as I wasn't openly stating that my script was a clone of secretadmirer.com (which I wasn't stating). They made every effort to "scare" me but it didn't work. That script paid my rent for the entire year.

Even an NDA and non-compete wouldn't necessarily save you from having this situation come up. If you're both selling the script or both running a site using the script, do it better than your competition. If you're running a website with the script and he starts selling it, then you're pretty much screwed.

exactly

make sure he understands that if he voids one hes gonna pay