| Professional programming's only been around for 2-3 generations. I don't think there's any hard evidence for the skills being limited to a particular domain - rather the opposite, we keep discovering new things to apply code to. It used to be that programming was seen just as "large scale number crunching" and even top people in the computer industry didn't see greater application(e.g. the "only 5 computers in the world" quote often attributed to Tom Watson). We've progressed quite a ways from that point, and nowadays I think we've reached an era where no programmer can be expected to know all the programming knowledge that exists. There are too many different domains and specialties. And that, in turn, means that as a society we need yet more programmers to cover all possibilities and make more discoveries. I think "skill" is very tangential to the discussion, because one of the domains that has ample room to progress is language design and engineering techniques. When people online toss around phrases like "best practice" and "professional-grade" you can take it with a grain of salt - most code barely works, we don't actually know how to do it right, and we spend most of our time on concerns that are bikeshedding, not order-of-magnitude productivity enhancers. We're still catching up with some ideas from the 70s about how to build software. Instead just be "humble yet courageous." If you don't know if it's right, marshal all your available defenses - source control, backups, comments, references, IRC channels etc. - and then go try it. It's an experiment, and it probably won't take long to figure out if it has problems. |