So what? It's like geek, artist, human, Minnesotan or whatever. It isn't a term meant to be precise. In fact you can also program a channel on the radio or on

So what? It's like geek, artist, human, Minnesotan or whatever. It isn't a term meant to be precise. In fact you can also program a channel on the radio or on TV. I don't think it's true that most people will consider themselves programmers, because they learned programming. Everybody learns science, writing or mathematics still only a small fraction of the people call themselves scientists, writers, mathematicians. In the last two cases it is something everyone does every day and be it just to calculate how many minutes you have to wait for the bus. Also system administrators also use programming skills, still they are not programmers or consider themselves as something like that. Same is true for web designers. I think it's a bad idea to say someone is a foo programmer, foo being something like "web application". The author seems somehow mixes up programming, algorithm design and computer science. Last but not least I don't think studying computer science makes someone a computer scientists, just like you don't become an artist studying arts or a philosopher studying philosophy. I never heard of anyone having a serious problem with the term. There are occasionally discussions about programming and scripting, but that's usually to boast in one way or the other. A more serious question usually is how much you need to know to call yourself a programmer, be it in general or be it something like <insert language here> programmer. It's rather funny to see that you can more quickly become a guy "knowing" assembly, javascript or C than for example Perl, Python or Ruby with Perl being interesting for you can easily get into basics, but most likely learn everything in your whole lifetime. Another example is whether you can call someone knowing just Rails or just LÖVE a Ruby or Lua programmer, no matter how much that person is able to achieve using such frameworks. But for all these things one can usually just talk to people. It doesn't seem like a good idea to limit someone to a small number of terms, no matter how board or specific they are.