[Nevermark]

“Identity” is an overloaded word.

It can mean a category flag someone waves, an identifier we ask others to respect, a group we choose to belong to, a way of understanding what it is we like about ourselves, or something we quietly aspire to.

[jacquesm]

Or literally a part of the self, which is what the OP was getting at I think. And there is plenty of that in the software world. "I'm a Rubyist", "I'm a Pythonista", "A rustacean" and so on. There is plenty of identity ridiculousness. I've been a C programmer but I've also been a basic programmer an assembly language programmer, a PHP programmer, a FORTH programmer and a whole list of others. To me that collapses to "I'm a programmer" (even if the sage advice on HN by the gurus is to never call yourself a programmer I'm more than happy to do so). It defines what I do, not what or who I am, and it only defines a very small part of what I do. That's one reason why I can't stand the us-vs-them mentality that some programming languages seem to install in their practitioners.

[zabzonk]

> "I'm a Rubyist", "I'm a Pythonista", "A rustacean"

it suddenly struck me that there has never, AFAIK, a single-word noun for a C++ programmer. not sure what, if anything, this implies.

[netule]

I think it’s because C++ programmers tend to define themselves by the domain they work in. Game developer, embedded systems engineer, firmware developer, etc.

[saghm]

I feel like it implies "it's harder to make a word out of 'C++' than it is for things that already naturally evolved as words people say like 'Ruby', 'Python', or 'Rust'".

[steve1977]

I'm a Swiftie! Oh wait... oh no...

[hcs]

A Seymour

[christophilus]

“I’m a null pointer exception debugger.”

[aleph_minus_one]

> “I’m a null pointer exception debugger.”

NullPointerException is the Java world. In C++, dereferencing a null pointer is rather undefined behaviour.

[namrog84]

So it's perfectly fitting the noun for c++ dev is undefined behavior :D

[actionfromafar]

Or just enjoy doing very much.

To clarify/nuance. Even if there was no economic nor social incentive for me to program; I'd still tinker with it, AI coding agent enhanced or not.