(Also is it just me or is "coder" possibly the worst word for "software engineer"?)
@Gargron when i hear "software engineer" i think of someone drawing boxes on a flip chart. when i hear "coder" i think of someone typing frantically on an ibm model m, grinning in contempt at the Non-Coders, and when you see their screen it's just a Quake II console
@jk @Gargron @dotUser
Yeah. Software developer is best, because it suggests iteration (where software engineer sounds like waterfall-era top-down stuff from the period when the engineers drew pretty flowcharts and had their secretaries write the actual code, and coder sounds like someone who doesn't think about structure first). Let's not even get into the issues with 'hacker'.
Even US-centric hacker jargon has a wide variety of terms for shoddy yet usable solutions -- some imported from UK english and some imported from other languages (mostly yiddish). Enough that people confuse kludge with kluge -- two words both meaning the same thing with unrelated etymologies!
@jk You wouldn't happen to have #synaesthesia, would you?
@drwho i do but only sound-to-color and numbers/letters/days of the week etc
@jk Cool!
Sound -> colors and patterns/tactile/proprioceptive/emotions over here.
@dotUser ESR and RMS like to pretend that use of the term is a media invention, but in the TWENEX era where security was zero & everybody with networked computer access was an entitled college student there was a lot of overlap. We really can't get away from the complexity of it.
It's a particularly difficult term because in many uses, it means both a thing and its opposite (a hack is both a kludge and an elegant solution).
@jk @Gargron @dotUser
The term is a fractal of ambiguity. It starts off meaning 'prankster', then it means 'someone who builds ugly circuits & writes ugly code', then it became 'someone who writes good code' because of people who write good code being modest.
Then it became 'someone who violates the computer fraud and abuse act'.
Then it became 'someone who reads ESR's blog'.
It's A Problem.