Now and then some programmer out there gets up on a soap box and proclaims what the real programmer should know. Usually as in knowing this language rather than that language.
Discussion follows on merits of this and that languages. Disconnected from the fact that programming is a flux of different people, exploring different things. Rather than conforming to someone’s checklist of being real.
So where does that come from?
Fallacy of serious
Once you question the origin of suggested characteristics for real programmers you realize that it is people talking about… themselves.
Their view of the programming world tends to go like this:
- low level things, which they forget exist
- low to mid level language, that they happen to think makes them the perfect standard of programmer, for others to aspire to
- higher level languages, that are inferior (for reasons) and so are people who code in them
- software end users, irrelevant to the argument altogether
This all is just a pile of mental poo.
Pyramid of empowerment
There are levels and layers in programming world. They have nothing to do with being right. They have everything to do with how exactly and on what you work on:
- low level things enable use of hardware
- mid level things take care of performance and creation of higher level languages
- high level things let people start to program and be productive
- end user software lets users accomplish things at highest level of abstraction
There isn’t a single layer in this which isn’t important.
And notice how each level is larger. The low level development makes programming possible at all. At high level it becomes popular. At higher levels it melts into user experience and stops even looking like programming.
We all are real
We are all programmers, we all explain computers what to do. No difference to reality of it being accomplished by clicking large button or micromanaging memory allocation to data structures.
It matters none which languages you can check on the list.
It is important that we empower ourselves and those around us. With responsibility to be competent and desire to keep learning.