[rorymarinich]

Personally I find the notion that "I define myself as a programmer" offensive. Programming is something I do, and I do it reasonably well, but at the end of the day it's only one of many things I do, and it's certainly not "who I am."

I agree. As I say, that's the sort of programmer I tend to like. The problem is, that's not the sort that aspiring programmers run into when they're first learning. I joined my first coding community at thirteen; for the last five years, I've seen no community that wasn't arrogant and hostile to a fault. The closest I got to nice was the Ubuntu community, who had a tendency to respond to bug reports with "You should look at the wiki page", where the wiki page was 50 pages long.

It reads like an 18-year-old who just finished high school and now thinks he's got it all figured out.

If I had it all figured out, I wouldn't write about it. As it stands, I'm aware of just how clueless I am. As I say here: I'm not a programmer. As I imply: I've been a part of this group of nerds for most of my life. I wrote this to engender a reaction amongst certain types of people, so I could get into a discussion with them about what's wrong with my statements here and what's right. The people I was expecting wasn't the Hacker News group. The fact that this post got rated this high makes me want to stop writing things with potentially ensnaring titles, because I don't want this on Hacker News.

I know I wrote it, and so I've got to own up to it here, but this wasn't the audience I wanted with this, and I regret that it's been put here.

[Psyonic]

I don't see what's so bad about identifying with your work. Would you be equally bothered by a doctor who considers himself a doctor, as opposed to saying "I do practice medicine, but that's only one of many things I do, and certainly not who I am?" Identification with profession is as old as time (last names anyone?) and often indicates someone who is passionate about their work.

[rorymarinich]

Perhaps it's that I think the vast majority of programmers are doing meaningless work, and so their use of the term has diluted what the word means for me. But then, I'd pick the term "designer" which some people think is just as meaningless.