[mikekchar]

My main criticism with your otherwise excellent article is the use of the word "tinkerer". "Tinker" has a pejorative meaning: "to busy oneself with a thing without useful results", "to work unskillfully or clumsily at anything." to take a couple of definitions from a random dictionary search.

I'm old enough to remember "shared source" and the classification of "hobbyists" in Microsoft's licenses. In that case the intent was to try to create a division between "professional" programmers, who would pay for useful access to source code and "hobbyists", who supposedly had no need for useful access to source code (because they aren't "professional").

I'm quite certain that's not your intent (and you say so several times in your article), but the implication still lingers. My area of interest is in language design and practitioners have made significant contributions to the field. Researchers are enabled because the endless experimentation of practitioners have narrowed the search space, even though it may have been done in an inefficient manner (by reinventing the wheel many more times than necessary). In turn practitioners have benefited greatly from the exhaustive knowledge and documentation of the researchers.

Both scholarship and practice are useful, but it is understandable that one group may emphasise one over the other and get different kinds of useful results.