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Re:Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) by icc97 on Tuesday March 13, 2018 @11:49AM (#16577094)
Perhaps we should stop trying to claim we do science or engineering and call it a craft

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_craftsmanship

[1]: http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org

Re:Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) by 52-6F-62 on Tuesday March 13, 2018 @12:02PM (#16577203)
Well, there are definitely distinctions to be made, as in electrical and electronics work — I'm drawing crude lines here —

An Electrician may be a master of his craft, but yet not an Electrical Engineer, who may be a masterful engineer but yet not possessing as deep an understanding as a Physicist, and so on.

That said, the scale tips both ways. A physicist may know why and how an electron behaves a certain way within a material making up a resistor, but not have the practical know-how to use that in an effective way as an engineer might. An engineer might be able to hack together a prototype, but lack the refined master skill and discipline of an electrician to employ the designs and put it into a real world context on a regular basis. It goes without saying that you'll much more rarely see a physicist out in the field laying cable for power distribution in a new train station, etc. There's an old aphorism that leans into this a bit: "the wise things confound the simple, and the simple things confound the wise". I'm abusing that a bit, but still kind of works.

I'm making a gross guess here, but maybe it's that science and engineering, in modern times, hold more of a lofty position and boast greater intellectual capacity traditionally, that so many would not want to be 'reduced' to a craftsman. We might do better to consider them just different aspects of the same whole.

Re:Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) by zaarn on Tuesday March 13, 2018 @12:01PM (#16577189)
It's probably not too wrong.

Software development unites a lot of things from science, engineering and craftsmanship. I guess we should stop trying to cram it into preexisting categories and take the best parts of each subcategory.

Re:Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) by lttlrck on Tuesday March 13, 2018 @07:24PM (#16580802)
If more programmers would apply scientific method to their craft they’d engineer much better software.