[zaarn]

I view programming similar to carpentry or metalwork. You can't really sit down and learn metalwork in 24 hours.

24 hours is not even how long I had to file a metal block until I was deemed ready to use heavy machinery during secondary school. I filed it for 3 weeks, 5 days a week, 9 to 5.

21 days is not enough to master metalwork, even though I was allowed to use heavy machinery, I borked up more than one piece until I eventually got it right at the end of the school year (which was about 6 months of metalwork).

And I think I am still way of from mastering it, not that I want to.

Programming is, IMO very similar. Sure, you can get a hammer and start hammering on a metal sheet and that'll probably produce something in the right shape. But learning to program, mastering it, takes time, 10 years is IMO a good estimate. I've been at it for 8 years now and I still got very much to learn.

Of course people can become good with a programming language, just like you can get good at filing a metal block in 3 weeks. But it doesn't mean you've mastered all the tools yet.

[icc97]

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

[52-6F-62]

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.

[zaarn]

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.

[lttlrck]

If more programmers would apply scientific method to their craft they’d engineer much better software.