[Jtsummers]

Novice, not amateur.

Amateurs aren't paid, professionals are.

Novices are inexperienced, journeyman and masters are more skilled and experienced.

A novice can have a ton of knowledge (from books), but be too inexperienced to apply it.

A novice can be a professional, this is what internships and entry-level jobs are supposed to be for. Paired with mentorship and structured work assignments (structured in the sense of increasing complexity, scope, and responsibility) they're brought up to journeyman and, later, master level.

They can also be amateurs. Given forums, books, manuals, mentors (real-life or online), they can be brought up to journeyman and master level as well.

[hex13]

Besides I think everybody who e.g. makes some side-projects, or is active in open source is in fact amateur in the sense of "a person who does something (such as a sport or hobby) for pleasure and not as a job" :)

[Jtsummers]

In general, if a professional also donated their time to something it doesn't make them an amateur. See lawyers doing pro bono work, or carpenters building a habitat house as examples.

[dakotasmith]

I was following usage as it was in the thread, though I agree that amateur is being thrown around this thread where novice is the word implied.

[Jtsummers]

Yeah, sorry. I realized after I posted that I should've put this upstream.

[nickbauman]

Professional means you teach (notice the word root in "profess" as in "professor"). It really means you know enough that you can teach others how to do it right, not about get paid for it per se.

[solipsism]

You have the etymology of "professor" and "professional" completely wrong. You can't just notice the same root in two words and then completely reinvent the meaning of one to make it have something to do with the meaning of the other. The evolution of language is complex. Here: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=etymology+profession

[Jtsummers]

Do professional football players teach playing football? Some, probably, but not all. We don't call those who don't teach amateurs. They're getting paid. The amateurs are the high school and (arguably) college players, along with rec club and pick-up game players.

You're noticing a common root, but not the meaning of the word in the modern day.

Decimate means to destroy 1 in 10 of something (like an opposing army). But today we use the word to mean destruction of a large percentage.

I suppose an argument can be made that modern use of amateur is more akin to what used to be novice. However, I'd have a hard time accepting that except when it's used as a slur. We talk about amateurs in many fields, but don't intend to dismiss them as unskilled or inexperienced, we're classifying them as non-professionals. In a forum like this, filled with amateur programmers, it seems, to me, that it's wrong to misuse the term in this manner when a large portion of the readers here are amateur programmers but of moderate to high skill level.