[lackbeard]

Good comment, and, basically, I fully agree, except, I really dislike your attempt to appropriate the words "programming" and "coding" here. Like, can you just explain what you mean without trying to redefine terms that have broadly accepted definitions distinct from how you're trying to use them here?

(Sorry, this probably sounds more critical than I'm intending...)

[caslon]

Programming requires creative thinking. Coding, historically, was a lower-paid, unskilled position.

You may think this is redefinition. It's not. This is how both terms originated. A "coder" did the unskilled gruntwork of implementation for business projects, while a programmer was holistic.

> I find it bizarre that people now use the term "coding" to mean programming. For decades, we used the word "coding" for the work of low-level staff in a business programming team. The designer would write a detailed flow chart, then the "coders" would write code to implement the flow chart. This is quite different from what we did and do in the hacker community -- with us, one person designs the program and writes its code as a single activity. When I developed GNU programs, that was programming, but it was definitely not coding.

> Since I don't think the recent fad for "coding" is an improvement, I have decided not to adopt it. I don't use the term "coding", unless I am talking about a business programming team which has coders.

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

In this case, it is you, and the wider cottage industry of business "coders" who are doing the appropriation. It's not your fault. The bootcamp or Super Cool Totally Serious College you likely learned from probably used the term "coder" alongside words like "rockstar!" You were given a bad definition, and never knew any better at all. ChuckMcM's comment, on the other hand, is correct. Using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively," while colloquial, is still less correct than figuratively.

The phrase "code monkey" is not a compliment, and didn't come from nowhere. It came directly from these pre-existing definitions.

Programming requires logic. If you are coding, the thinking's already been done for you. You are just doing unskilled labor akin to data entry to get the computer to actually follow the instructions.

[johnnyanmac]

Thing is that no one hires "coders" anymore, even if many people's jobs are in fact mostly coding instead of establishing the design. It's a weird stigma that translated to companies low key lying about what they really want out of an engineer.

It's a shame because there's a nice flow to coding once you got everything nailed down. Coders are no different from (human language) translators and like good localizers, a really good "coder" understands the subtleties of the language. If your application is concerned about scalability or performance or cross-compatibility, you aren't just googling an API and pasting in commands to get something working.

But I guess coding may not really be a thing in the next few decades if AI really does catch on.

[ChuckMcM]

No worries, got to use something as the holder of the definition. FWIW I read a similar essay that discussed cooks and chefs and came away seeing the many parallels with programming and coding.