| What do you think about: * Chef's Knife * Painter's Palette * Carpenter's Toolbelt * Teacher's Guide ... They are all terms that work in a similar way: they qualify the name of a tool or object by the profession of who's using it. The qualifier mattes. A Teacher's Guide is not just a guide that happens to be owned by a teacher.
A chef's knife is not whatever knife a chef happens to be using. The reason this feels outdated or "wrong" when applied to the job of "peogrammers" very likely has less to do with English grammar or whether "programmer's editor" per se is idiomatic or not rather than the fact that the name "programmer" to denote the profession of who writes computer programs has fallen out of favour. Take a quick look at LinkedIn and you'll rarely see people using the title "programmer" and rather use "developer" or "software engineer". Some people even use "builder". The words "developer" and "builder" are still actively used on some parts of the anglosphere to denote people who build buildings. The demise of the word programmer is interesting. Is it because it got associated with a boring cubicle job, devoid of any creativity? In any case, within a given profession you don't quite need the qualifier. Chefs will ask they colleagues to fetch a knife, not a Chef's knife A painter will grab a palette, not a painter's palette. The professional qualifier is obviously redundant when you're talking inside the circle of a given profession. So it's entirely expected to "sound weird" if we refer to an editor as programmer's editor when we're in a forum of software developers. My point is that it's not wrong in the sense you're making it out to be wrong. Yes it's an unnecessary qualifier. But so what. |