6 ms·

Ultimately it seems strangely exclusionary to draw lines in the sand like this. Everyone who learns how to program doesn't need to A.) be god's gift to the scie

Ultimately it seems strangely exclusionary to draw lines in the sand like this. Everyone who learns how to program doesn't need to A.) be god's gift to the science of computing and B.) have the same level of understanding/fluency in what they're doing. It's like saying the only way to teach any amount of a language is to require 6 months of total immersion. There is value in someone taking on year of a language and learning a few phrases, and moving on. Ultimately, people have practical and immediate concerns, like getting paid and putting food on the table. We aren't all programming for the same reasons, and sometimes getting the job done is all people have time or even the inclination to do. And we shouldn't judge them for that. I'm not suggesting that he is entirely wrong, but reading things that sound like proselytizing just make me sad. There is so much room to educate and come to mutual understandings. Some people might think they've found a better route or a deeper understanding, but treating the rest like idiots is the best way to make sure they never get your message.

username90 6y ago
You want those lines though, glue software engineers tend to get really bitter when they get quizzed on computer science stuff, so it is in their best interest to draw the line instead of arguing that they should have the same title.
- rxhernandez 6y ago
  There is far more to writing correct code than knowing the contents of undergraduate computer science inside and out; there is an entire world of software engineering where undergraduate computer science theory is damn near meaningless. I mean, I worked at a medium sized medical device company (10,000+ people) (who was considered the gold standard of their industry in many respects) where you would be hard pressed to find a single person that wrote a lot of code who had anything but a Physics, EE or CpE degree; I honestly can't remember a single person who had a CS degree despite being on an algorithms team. I can't even remember a single person at the scientific device company I worked at where their algorithms team had anything but PhDs in Physics.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    In my experience embedded or control system software is more about the thing being controlled than anything else so that would seem natural?
  - sn41 6y ago
    I agree with the first paragraph. The second and third paragraphs are alarming. Anti-elitism is never a good thing in actual technical fields. Of course, the lead may be from outside CS, but to say that there is not a single CS person or an expert in embedded systems and OS, who was involved in the design and testing of a pacemaker is not very confidence-building.
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      > Anti-elitism is never a good thing in actual technical fields I think it's not anti-elitism but just elitism. Outside the CS bubble, being a PhD physicist has more prestige and status than being a PhD computer scientist. A physicist is universally recognized as a scientist, nobody would ever question that. A "computer scientist" is not universally regarded as such. I'm not arguing whether it should be, but it's clearly not universally like that in people's perceptions.
      - AcademicHamster 6y ago
        > Outside the CS bubble, being a PhD physicist has more prestige and status than being a PhD computer scientist. I disagree with this take. Just as there is more “applied” physics and “theoretical” physics there is similarly “theoretical” computer science and more “applied” computer science. The former camp are similar to the theoretical physicist as many of them are mathematicians with a computer science bent. Even within the “applied” CS camp you have experts in number theory and algebra that apply their skills to cryptography, whereas in the “theoretical” camp you may find theorist using mathematics like homotopy type theory, category theory and the like in their research. Number theory, graph theory, combinatorics, abstract algebra, category theory and the like can get really hardcore in the pure math world. Similarly, theoretical physicist also have to know a lot of mathematics. I think your optics of what a computer scientist is and does is a bit removed from reality and that PhDs in CS are highly respected (I didn’t even mention the folks working in AI or quantum computing or the other important areas of the field).
- zachdaniel 6y ago
  This highlights something interesting for me: I've literally never heard anyone "arguing" that they should have the title of "software engineer" or "programmer" or "software developer". I don't know the history of it, and it could easily just be something that I haven't personally witnessed. Ultimately I fall into the camp of someone who would do fine getting quizzed on the computer science stuff, but at the same time it is ultimately about adding value (at least, when we're talking about someone paying you to work for them). There aren't two camps: "glue software engineers" and "computer scientists". There is a spectrum of people with varying abilities in a wide array of sub-fields.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    I use "nerd" as my job title.
  - tester34 6y ago
    >I've literally never heard anyone "arguing" that they should have the title of "software engineer" or "programmer" or "software developer" this kind of discussions only happens on the internet because in reality nobody gives a *, especially that the only place that seems to distinguish those is the USA coders/developers/programmers/se/programming ninjas/shamans/system necromants an artifical titles
    - simonh 6y ago
      I used to work for a small company that developed a cellular radio network design application and also had a radio network engineering consultancy arm. We renamed the product and changed our job titles to include Engineer and Engineering because our sales people said it enabled them to charge more and sell up our services more easily, and I believe them. I was on some sales meetings to provide technical background so I could see they knew what they were doing. It may seem silly, but words mean things and you need to clearly and effectively articulate why your product is valuable, or what value you bring as an employee. Effective communication is really important.
      - 6y ago
- antegamisou 6y ago
  > glue software engineers Where do you put the line between them and “purist” SWEs? Even Things like #include <stdio.h> already make you a gluer.
  - username90 6y ago
    It isn't possible to draw a hard line, no. But people tend to identify themselves as one or the other, just ask them whether technical or social is the most important aspect of their work. Gluing things together requires you to communicate more, like adding a library or depending on an api or reusing code from another team. Building things yourself is just code, less questions so less social work but more technical work.
chriswarbo 6y ago
I like the analogy that English writers don't have to be at Shakespeare's level; even being able to write a shopping list is a very useful. Hence it's a good idea to teach everyone reading and writing at school. I think the programming equivalent of a shopping list would be something like a simple 1, 2, 3 cron script, or if-this-then-that event handlers. That only needs a very basic understanding of computing (and how to find information effectively online), but opens up lots of really useful automation, e.g. backing up files, sending an email (e.g. a notification/reminder to ourselves), etc. Even without some automated API to use, a sequence of 'print' and 'sleep' commands can be useful to help ourselves/others perform some common task, e.g. a receipe which tells us when to turn down the oven, when to put on the pasta, etc. Hence I think it's a good idea to have simple 'learn to code' classes in schools; whilst more advanced classes would be optional for those wanting to specialise down that path.
- coddle-hark 6y ago
  I would go even further and say that the most important aspect of teaching programming in schools is simply exposure. Most people don’t stumble upon programming in their day to day lives, especially now in the age of iPads and other locked down devices, so it’s important that the subset of population that would be good programmers are given the opportunity to at least try it out early in life.
  - virgilp 6y ago
    I'd argue that they do, and that will become more and more true. Things as simple as an Excel file, or writing simple email filtering rules may expose you to _some_ programming. As a side note - I believe this is going to be more and more true, especially among knowledge workers - I'm somewhat bullish on UiPath's low-code app platform [+]. As programmers we understand well the benefits (and pitfalls) of automating our menial tasks, if you can lower the bar so that most people (like assistant managers, receptionists, call center operators etc) can do that - you suddenly start exposing much wider audiences to programming. It's a tough problem but I believe RPA might just be the right foundation to enable that sort of thing. [+] Disclaimer: I work for them so maybe that's natural :)

username90 6y ago

You want those lines though, glue software engineers tend to get really bitter when they get quizzed on computer science stuff, so it is in their best interest to draw the line instead of arguing that they should have the same title.

rxhernandez 6y ago
There is far more to writing correct code than knowing the contents of undergraduate computer science inside and out; there is an entire world of software engineering where undergraduate computer science theory is damn near meaningless. I mean, I worked at a medium sized medical device company (10,000+ people) (who was considered the gold standard of their industry in many respects) where you would be hard pressed to find a single person that wrote a lot of code who had anything but a Physics, EE or CpE degree; I honestly can't remember a single person who had a CS degree despite being on an algorithms team. I can't even remember a single person at the scientific device company I worked at where their algorithms team had anything but PhDs in Physics.
- arethuza 6y ago
  In my experience embedded or control system software is more about the thing being controlled than anything else so that would seem natural?
- sn41 6y ago
  I agree with the first paragraph. The second and third paragraphs are alarming. Anti-elitism is never a good thing in actual technical fields. Of course, the lead may be from outside CS, but to say that there is not a single CS person or an expert in embedded systems and OS, who was involved in the design and testing of a pacemaker is not very confidence-building.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    > Anti-elitism is never a good thing in actual technical fields I think it's not anti-elitism but just elitism. Outside the CS bubble, being a PhD physicist has more prestige and status than being a PhD computer scientist. A physicist is universally recognized as a scientist, nobody would ever question that. A "computer scientist" is not universally regarded as such. I'm not arguing whether it should be, but it's clearly not universally like that in people's perceptions.
    - AcademicHamster 6y ago
      > Outside the CS bubble, being a PhD physicist has more prestige and status than being a PhD computer scientist. I disagree with this take. Just as there is more “applied” physics and “theoretical” physics there is similarly “theoretical” computer science and more “applied” computer science. The former camp are similar to the theoretical physicist as many of them are mathematicians with a computer science bent. Even within the “applied” CS camp you have experts in number theory and algebra that apply their skills to cryptography, whereas in the “theoretical” camp you may find theorist using mathematics like homotopy type theory, category theory and the like in their research. Number theory, graph theory, combinatorics, abstract algebra, category theory and the like can get really hardcore in the pure math world. Similarly, theoretical physicist also have to know a lot of mathematics. I think your optics of what a computer scientist is and does is a bit removed from reality and that PhDs in CS are highly respected (I didn’t even mention the folks working in AI or quantum computing or the other important areas of the field).
zachdaniel 6y ago
This highlights something interesting for me: I've literally never heard anyone "arguing" that they should have the title of "software engineer" or "programmer" or "software developer". I don't know the history of it, and it could easily just be something that I haven't personally witnessed. Ultimately I fall into the camp of someone who would do fine getting quizzed on the computer science stuff, but at the same time it is ultimately about adding value (at least, when we're talking about someone paying you to work for them). There aren't two camps: "glue software engineers" and "computer scientists". There is a spectrum of people with varying abilities in a wide array of sub-fields.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  I use "nerd" as my job title.
- tester34 6y ago
  >I've literally never heard anyone "arguing" that they should have the title of "software engineer" or "programmer" or "software developer" this kind of discussions only happens on the internet because in reality nobody gives a *, especially that the only place that seems to distinguish those is the USA coders/developers/programmers/se/programming ninjas/shamans/system necromants an artifical titles
  - simonh 6y ago
    I used to work for a small company that developed a cellular radio network design application and also had a radio network engineering consultancy arm. We renamed the product and changed our job titles to include Engineer and Engineering because our sales people said it enabled them to charge more and sell up our services more easily, and I believe them. I was on some sales meetings to provide technical background so I could see they knew what they were doing. It may seem silly, but words mean things and you need to clearly and effectively articulate why your product is valuable, or what value you bring as an employee. Effective communication is really important.
    - 6y ago
antegamisou 6y ago
> glue software engineers Where do you put the line between them and “purist” SWEs? Even Things like #include <stdio.h> already make you a gluer.
- username90 6y ago
  It isn't possible to draw a hard line, no. But people tend to identify themselves as one or the other, just ask them whether technical or social is the most important aspect of their work. Gluing things together requires you to communicate more, like adding a library or depending on an api or reusing code from another team. Building things yourself is just code, less questions so less social work but more technical work.

chriswarbo 6y ago

I like the analogy that English writers don't have to be at Shakespeare's level; even being able to write a shopping list is a very useful. Hence it's a good idea to teach everyone reading and writing at school. I think the programming equivalent of a shopping list would be something like a simple 1, 2, 3 cron script, or if-this-then-that event handlers. That only needs a very basic understanding of computing (and how to find information effectively online), but opens up lots of really useful automation, e.g. backing up files, sending an email (e.g. a notification/reminder to ourselves), etc. Even without some automated API to use, a sequence of 'print' and 'sleep' commands can be useful to help ourselves/others perform some common task, e.g. a receipe which tells us when to turn down the oven, when to put on the pasta, etc. Hence I think it's a good idea to have simple 'learn to code' classes in schools; whilst more advanced classes would be optional for those wanting to specialise down that path.

coddle-hark 6y ago
I would go even further and say that the most important aspect of teaching programming in schools is simply exposure. Most people don’t stumble upon programming in their day to day lives, especially now in the age of iPads and other locked down devices, so it’s important that the subset of population that would be good programmers are given the opportunity to at least try it out early in life.
- virgilp 6y ago
  I'd argue that they do, and that will become more and more true. Things as simple as an Excel file, or writing simple email filtering rules may expose you to _some_ programming. As a side note - I believe this is going to be more and more true, especially among knowledge workers - I'm somewhat bullish on UiPath's low-code app platform [+]. As programmers we understand well the benefits (and pitfalls) of automating our menial tasks, if you can lower the bar so that most people (like assistant managers, receptionists, call center operators etc) can do that - you suddenly start exposing much wider audiences to programming. It's a tough problem but I believe RPA might just be the right foundation to enable that sort of thing. [+] Disclaimer: I work for them so maybe that's natural :)