[SIGCIS-Members] Programmer vs. coder vs. sofware developer vs. software engineer

[Luke Fernandez]

Bill,

For a short take you might like Ian Bogost's 2015 Atlantic piece titled
Programmers Stop Calling Yourself Engineers:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/programmers-should-not-call-themselves-engineers/414271/


And to Cortada's mention of the sociology of professions I might also
recommend Burton Bledstein's The Culture of Professionalism.  (Side story:
I was appalled to see my library "remaindering" this book a few years ago
-- I'm now its proud owner).

Best,

Luke Fernandez
lfernandez.org

On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 6:00 PM Michael Halvorson <halvormj at plu.edu> wrote:

> Bill,
>
> Nathan's *The Computer Boys Take Over* is a great resource for the
> changing vocabulary related to software construction in the 1960s and the
> institutional and professional power that came with new titles and roles.
>
> If you're interested in how the story continues into the era of PCs, my
> new book *Code Nation: Personal Computing and the Learn to Program
> Movement in America* (ACM Books, 2020) explores the wide range of people
> who experimented with or claimed programmer status in the 1970s, 80s, and
> 90s in America's programming communities. This includes professional
> software engineers in emerging tech companies but also the hobbyists,
> educators, students, gamers, hackers, writers, and everyday citizens who
> created or modified software but didn't use the traditional labels.
>
> A backdrop of my book's presentation are the computer literacy debates of
> the era, and a number of the historic languages and tools, but you'll also
> see how people learned to write code for new platforms such as CP/M,
> MS-DOS, Unix/Xenix, Windows, and the Apple Macintosh.
>
> The book is available now in the ACM Digital Library
> <https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/3368274>--
>
> All the best,
>
> Michael Halvorson, Ph.D.
> Professor of History
> Pacific Lutheran University
> Tacoma, WA 98447
>
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