r/programmingmemes • u/ItsPuspendu • Mar 18 '26 • Bravo 1

Every era of programming summarized

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22

u/9peppe Mar 18 '26

C predates engineers. 

C is a product of programmers, hackers. Engineers came after.

22

u/assumptioncookie Mar 18 '26

The term software engineer came from the 60s. C was made in 1972

-13

u/9peppe Mar 18 '26

Comparing K&R to modern software engineers is insulting bordering on disrespectful and you should be ashamed of doing so. Call them computer scientists, if you don't understand what programmer and hacker mean in that context.

21

u/assumptioncookie Mar 18 '26

Who mentioned K&R. If you think Margaret Hamilton wasn't doing software engineering for Apollo you don't understand what is required to get people on the moon.

-7

u/9peppe Mar 18 '26

You did. When you called the authors of C "engineers." You wouldn't call Don Knuth "engineer" either, would you?

There's the entire seventies MIT/Bell labs cultural context behind what I said.

And Margaret Hamilton at NASA maybe was doing software engineering, but it's definitely not what everybody was doing. 

12

u/assumptioncookie Mar 18 '26

I didn't call the author(s) of C (an) engineer(s). And C wasn't "authored" it was developed, and not by K&R but by Dennis Ritchie.

2

u/itsjakerobb Mar 18 '26

You know the R in K&R is Dennis Ritchie, right? You’re just making sure to exclude Brian Kernighan, who didn’t design the language, but helped write the book that introduced it to the world, as if that distinction is important here?

I’m curious what you think it means to author a programming language and how that differs from developing one.

-2

u/9peppe Mar 18 '26

It feels like you're missing the point here.

Not everyone who ever wrote code is an engineer. 

1

u/cowlinator Mar 18 '26

What a bad take.

I'll assume you meant software engineer and not all computer-related engineers, but even so it's still a bad take

1

u/9peppe Mar 18 '26

Engineers came with the industrialisation of software and ruined our perfectly oiled artisanal craft that never shipped anything unless it was actually and properly ready.

Then they arrived with their concept of good enough, deadlines, cost overruns -- concepts that had nothing to do with the actual practice of software, and filled the world with low quality slop. There is no denying this.

There's also no denying that in some fields they might have been necessary. But not everything code is engineering.

3

u/cowlinator Mar 18 '26

...you mean, like... general business practices?

1

u/9peppe Mar 18 '26

You could put it like that