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> The profession of programmers who only know how to program should disappear like the profession of scribes who only know how to write. I think it would be be
by Natsu 14y ago
> The profession of programmers who only know how to program should disappear like the profession of scribes who only know how to write.
I think it would be better to say that the new programmers would replace the old as writers replaced scribes. Because we do have people who only write, it's just not quite the same.
- gcv 14y agoWriters are not merely new scribes. Writers are people who use the written word for some specific purpose. Very coarsely, I claim that novelists are storytellers, poets are artists (who use words as the medium, like sculptors use marble or bronze), biographers are historians, textbook authors are teachers, journalists are investigators. For all these subtypes of "writer," the process of getting words on paper (or into a Word document, or an Emacs buffer!) is simply a means to an end. They certainly don't "only write" — at least not the ones who produce anything remotely worth reading.
- Natsu 14y ago> Writers are not merely new scribes. Indeed, that's why I made the comparison :) The new and old programmers he describes are not the same either.