"Programmer" is an Overgeneralization

The first thing I disagree with is the idea that programmers are not all 'programmers'.

My Dad is a civil engineer to everyone except other civil engineers and a guy who drives a truck is a driver as much as a guy who drives a rally car. What's the problem?

Every term, especially those of specialised subjects, has both general and specific forms.

It is neither insulting nor a gross simplification to describe yourself as a programmer to a non-programmer despite the fact that few of us would refer to ourselves with that exact term when discussing our work with another programmer.

Programmer → games programmer → graphics programmer → shader programmer: all programmers.

Programmer → server programmer → database programmer → Non-SQL (Couch DB) specialist: all programmers.

What would the shader programmer call herself when talking to the Couch DB programmer? Would they even know what the other did? Why does it matter that they have to go back up the chain to find the most specific term that they both understand.

Secondly, I disagree with the idea that we are not doing the same fundamental job. The word programmer does not 'cover a stupendously large spectrum of abilities and skill levels' that's a programmer with a superiority complex asserting his own status and the complexity of his career. Both the guy who designs the hardware and the guy who comes out to fix a broken socket at the back of your unit is called a TV Engineer as they are both dealing with the internals of a TV.

Thirdly I disagree that our job is difficult and therefore we are somehow superior—an idea, sadly, that this article reeks of. We deal with data and algorithms that manipulate data. Its not that difficult, which is why so many people do it for a living. If it paid more I'm sure many of us would be dealing with Tar McAdam and telling the world how extremely difficult it was to get it perfectly flat.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU)

EDIT: Reading the comments here (and over there) reaffirms the correctness of my decision not to get into definitions about "what is a programmer" with technical folks! Lots of great ideas, very little organization.

The funny thing is, it's possible to do a post about what really makes a programmer -- but nobody would read it. People would happily read articles about the importance of programming, the importance of programmers, etc, Emotional, take-a-stand articles are fun to read and comment on, even (or especially) if the definition of the thing discussed is so vague!

I'm not sure if that is a bug of human nature or a feature.

It's like geek, artist, human, Minnesotan or whatever. It isn't a term meant to be precise. In fact you can also program a channel on the radio or on TV.

I don't think it's true that most people will consider themselves programmers, because they learned programming. Everybody learns science, writing or mathematics still only a small fraction of the people call themselves scientists, writers, mathematicians. In the last two cases it is something everyone does every day and be it just to calculate how many minutes you have to wait for the bus.

Also system administrators also use programming skills, still they are not programmers or consider themselves as something like that. Same is true for web designers.

I think it's a bad idea to say someone is a foo programmer, foo being something like "web application".

The author seems somehow mixes up programming, algorithm design and computer science.

Last but not least I don't think studying computer science makes someone a computer scientists, just like you don't become an artist studying arts or a philosopher studying philosophy.

I never heard of anyone having a serious problem with the term. There are occasionally discussions about programming and scripting, but that's usually to boast in one way or the other.

A more serious question usually is how much you need to know to call yourself a programmer, be it in general or be it something like programmer. It's rather funny to see that you can more quickly become a guy "knowing" assembly, javascript or C than for example Perl, Python or Ruby with Perl being interesting for you can easily get into basics, but most likely learn everything in your whole lifetime. Another example is whether you can call someone knowing just Rails or just LÖVE a Ruby or Lua programmer, no matter how much that person is able to achieve using such frameworks.

But for all these things one can usually just talk to people. It doesn't seem like a good idea to limit someone to a small number of terms, no matter how board or specific they are.

Yes, "programmer" is very general. So is "doctor", "lawyer", "engineer", "teacher", etc, etc.