From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,97188312486d4578 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: What's the best language to start with Date: 1996/08/11 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 173608722 references: organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-08-11T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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.