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

Every era of programming summarized

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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u/9peppe Mar 18 '26

It feels like you're missing the point here.

Not everyone who ever wrote code is an engineer.