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by hueving 3974 days ago
Do we call people that put together chairs structural engineers? Do we call baristas chemists? Baseball players physicists?

Words exist for a reason, and using a spreadsheet does not make you a programmer. However I can already see that programmer is being diluted to mean anyone proficient with a computer. What term should we use for people that can write software? 'Software engineer' feels like overkill for writing small self-contained scripts.

2 comments

> What term should we use for people that can write software?

I don't think there's a need for a word, just as there is no word for a person who can swim (swimmer implies they do it regularly) or a person who can assemble IKEA products.

So you're saying that someone writing a small self-contained script is a programmer, while someone who constructs a complex, multi-layered spreadsheet with complex functions, graphs and formatting isn't?