Oppugn.us

It's a sad state of affairs if programmers can no longer be famous for coding. But really, were programmers, at any point in history, capable of being famous for coding? I'm fairly young so I don't know much about what it was like to program back in the assembly, cobol and fortran days but it seems to me like the famous programmers weren't famous for their code back then either, rather they were famous for the academic papers they wrote.

Then, as far as I can tell it transitioned to the famous programmers being the ones that wrote books or possibly magazine articles. Then came the famous blogger/programmer, with blogger definitely the key part of that dichotomy. Now it's the ones founding companies and making a lot of money.

Is this really a problem though? Sure, it makes programmers a second class citizen, relegated to sweat away like the cog they are while others take credit for their hard work but is that likely to stay that way?

Well, yes and no.

I see programming ability being absorbed into general literacy. No one is going to praise you for writing a book. People write books all the time! There are technical manuals, instruction booklets and all manner of literature that won't ever see the inside of a brick and mortar bookstore and even if you get in your chances of getting famous for writing are very slim. Every so often someone will become famous writing/programming, but generally most authors/programmers will simply slave away in relative obscurity. Just look at what's happening now with companies such as Demand Media, hiring legions of cheap freelance writers to churn out mediocre articles about a subject so that they can rank highly on search engines. How is that any different that hiring a bunch of random programmers to put out yet another mediocre me-too b2b app?

Many professions will soon require programming ability. A fair percentage of my engineering graduate friends (mechanical especially but also civil a little and sometimes building) end up getting jobs writing C++. Their four year degree included a single class on C++ coding yet writing control systems in C++ is likely to be what they'll be doing for a good chunk of their careers.

Mathematics majors, the ones that don't go on to PHDs and write math papers for a living, are even more likely to be sucked up into programming. It's quite obvious what they'll be put to work on and it isn't particularly glamourous. Getting a master's in a complicated predictive analysis domain just to be put to work selling random junk more efficiently probably wasn't their life goal. I have a friend who's an excellent programmer that says he wouldn't hire a CS major, he'd hire a philosophy major with good logic skills and teach him properly rather than try to fix a mostly-broken CS grad.

I don't see any of these people ever getting famous for coding.

No writer cares about the engineer who designed his pen or the factory worked in China or the Philippines or wherever that assembled it. And I'm just as guilty. I need to do some video editing so I'm suck in windows right now so I'm writing this in a great little piece of software called notepad2. I can't for the life of me remember the name of the guy who wrote it. Yet it's always one of the first things I install on any windows machine. (I replace notepad.exe.) At the very least this excercise made me realize that the person who wrote this program is named Florian Balmer.

I don't think we'll ever see a day where programmers are famous for their code and that's probably ok. Because limiting yourself to your code is stifling. I think we should be what our passion is first and write code to support that second. We should be recognized for our passion and pursue that route to fame. _why wasn't famous for his code. _why was famous because of his art. The fact that his art was code is merely incidental. Of couse, this also sucks for me since I'm just a programmer and unless I do something about that I realize I'm destined to stay a cog. That's ok. If I want to be famous I'll do something noteworthy. It won't be code, though the implementation may require coding.