[hinkley]

I would agree with this except that I know that 95% of everybody is laughably awful at tasks as simple as reliably parsing or constructing a URL.

The class of difficult problems that you rightfully include crypto into is a lot wider than people want to admit to themselves. Hell most people and a number of programming languages I have worked with can't fathom the idea that other spoken languages might put words in a different order than your native language uses.

[Chris_Newton]

You make a reasonable point, but can the current join-the-dots culture of software development and having fewer “developers” who can actually perform basic development tasks themselves really be entirely unrelated?

[hinkley]

It's the "smart" ones who are the worst, unfortunately.

But I think there space for both the cut and paste crowd and the deep knowledge folks. In most industries the tool makers are separate from the users. The latter aren't worthless or subhuman because they don't do the former.

In most industries there's a place for fast people and there's a place for perfectionists. Tooling is not a volume business but needs a very low failure rate and good support.

We just haven't sorted ourselves into camps yet, but I think the era of stackoverflow is the beginning of that process.

[Chris_Newton]

In most industries the tool makers are separate from the users.

True, but I’m not sure software development is one of those industries.

Someone who makes pencils is not necessarily an artist, and vice versa. They require different skills and have different goals.

But where do someone who draws with those pencils, someone who makes colour-by-numbers books, and someone who uses the pencils to fill in those colour-by-numbers books fit into this analogy?

[hinkley]

My thought is that we're too young for it to be separate, but it'll come, and probably not too long from now.