Subj : Cobol/gnucobol
To   : Jcurtis
From : Nightfox
Date : Wed May 28 2025 15:56:59

> When I started way back when, we had programmers, systems programmers, and
> systems analysts. "Developers" back then meant real estate, construction,
> etc.

> IDK when the techno title lingo changed. What's wrong with "programmer."
> Maybe some geeks thought it sounds too geeky, so they found a word to make
> them sound less geeky.

> It's never bothered me to be called a programmer. Maybe I'll become a
> developer when I change careers to real estate.


It's not that "programmer" sounds too geeky.  These days, I think "programmer"
makes it sound like the only thing they do is write code, whereas "software
developer" and similar means they also think about what the software should do
and the overall software design of the software, how to make it easy for the
code to use other pieces of the code, etc.. Writing code (the programming) is
really only one aspect of developing software (and some might say it's the
final step in the process, as it's good to think about the design & things
first; however, I'm not sure many teams do it that way).

I don't really know when that might have changed, but over time, I think people
realized that writing software can be fairly complicated, and it's good to put
thought into the overall design, or else you could end up with code that's hard
to maintain.

Nightfox

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