Re: What's the best language to start with

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

I did not say that software engineers are incompetent and I did not say that
"programmers" are more competent than "software engineers". The difference
between these terms (or labels, if you want) doesn't directly relate to
some general competence. These "labels" can designate different _priorities_.
And you could not expect the same profile of competence from people with
substantionally different priorities.

Well I can't reconcile these two paragraphs, perhaps it is a language
problem, or perhaps there are two Alexanders :-)

In the first paragraph you say that incompetence (of this kind) is
characteristic of a "substanional" part of the growing mass of these
brave software engineers, and then in the second paragraph you
said that you were not commenting on relative competence associated
with the two labels.

Anyway the bottom line is that I think the distinction that you are
trying to make is absurd. There is no connection between incompetence
of this kind and the choice of label by either the programmer/SE themselves
or the outside perception of the terms. You seem to definitely have some
derogatory reaction to the term SE, which you are certainly entitled to, but
for me a software engineer is merely a programmer who takes an organized
engineering perspective to the job of producing code, and using "completely
absurd algorithms" is NOT part of such a perspective. On the contrary one
of the things we learn from the engineering disciplines is a respect for
the body of knowledge associated with an engineering field.