Flash Gordon said:
Cesar Rabak wrote, On 03/02/07 19:32:
I also suspect that most of the people worth listening to here are
considerable more than coders. They are also designers, analysts, in some
cases authors etc. It's more than a decade (probably a lot more) since I
would have considered applying for a job that advert for a coder, since
that implies taking a design written by someone else and coding it up
rather than analysing requirements, writing (or finding) algorithms,
designing etc.
Johnny spends his day at work sitting at a desk drawing letters and figures
on pieces of paper.
Two hundred years ago Johnny's mummy would have said proudly, "O, our
Johnny, he's in the office". Five hundred years or so ago Johnny would have
been a highly trained priest or monk, or in other words, "clerk". Now if
Johnny is a clerk then that implies his scribbling doesn't add much value;
it is simply part of the fairly unskilled routine adminstration of the
company.
However Johnny might be writing some profound new theorem in mathematics. If
he is called a "clerk" then that gets a bit irritating. Particualarly as the
value of a mathematical theorem isn't something that can always be
communicated to outsiders. So it is with coding. People who cannot program
but have tried tend to deprecate it. It can be a routine activity, it can be
a work of genius, normally it is somewhere in between; not so easy that
successful delivery can be guaranteed, but not tackling any questions of
philosphical interest either.
"Coder" implies a certain attitude. Programmers would do well to reject the
term.