I expect we won’t see these kinds of debates in 50 years. But right now, we’re just recently getting past the stage where anyone who programmed a computer was a

I expect we won’t see these kinds of debates in 50 years. But right now, we’re just recently getting past the stage where anyone who programmed a computer was a programmer. You’d see the same thing if anyone who used a keyboard was called a “Writer.” You’d see hello world tutorials demonstrating that all you have to do is press these keys on your keyboard and they show up in your text editor! You can be a Typer! And then what we actually call lawyers would come in and say no, writing a good document requires a ton of work and prior knowledge. And others would say that doesn’t matter because I just need it to write work emails and that’s more typical of a Typing job. They’d argue because they’re all talking about the same job, kinda, and that lets them talk past each other. Vague terms make for discussions that go nowhere. I hope in 50 years, being able to program hello world will be as universal as being able to type hello world, and the different parts of programming will have clear enough names that we can say the equivalent of: typing is easy, clear email communication takes some writing skill, and writing a good legal contract for your client is hard.