Fully agree with this, careful work is foundationally engineering. Slopping and not reviewing work is not.
Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
11–20 of 72 posts
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#12Weirdly, I thought the terms would be reversed… I think of a craftsman as someone who values quality over quantity, and makes everything beautiful and long lasting, while an engineer is more about productivity and tolerances and efficiency. A craftsman makes better quality but doesn’t scale the way an engineer and the factory process does, although mass produced goods sacrifice quality for quantity.
It's interesting how the words can be ambiguous like that. If I think of the distinction in the context of e.g. clothes, there's likely more engineering in fast fashion and more crafting in bespoke clothing. With food, more engineering in the food items you'd find at a gas station and more crafting at a restaurant.
>> “artisanal” coders who value the experience of coding over the final product
I don't see "artisanal" as that. It may be more that they value the details rather than the experience of coding. They value the details of the final product. Details that most people will not care about. The details that are present in bespoke clothing but missing in fast fashion, the details that are present in a good restaurant's food but missing from a gas station food item.
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#13I would call myself an artisanal programmer. Software Engineers are some of the least likable people I've ever met and being associated with them is cringe. Questions like, "Why are you using Notepad++ instead of using VSCode with 100+ plugins?" in a very condescending manner gets old very quickly. They need the title of Engineer because deep down they are very insecure. On the plus side, they're usually promoted ver…
Exactly, when the real question is "why are you using notepad++ instead of emacs, you philistine?"
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#14Way ahead of ya.
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#15Weirdly, I thought the terms would be reversed… I think of a craftsman as someone who values quality over quantity, and makes everything beautiful and long lasting, while an engineer is more about productivity and tolerances and efficiency. A craftsman makes better quality but doesn’t scale the way an engineer and the factory process does, although mass produced goods sacrifice quality for quantity.
id consider that a craftsman tends to build without constraints. an enginner meets the constraints with a defined safety factor.
an engineer uses tools that represent the current state of the science, while a craftsman uses tools passed down as archaic art that require meticulous skill to use rather than repeatable math
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#16But can they compete with my shade grown software? It does result in a 40% markup, but there's no putting a price on being raised in a loving environment, is there.
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#17Couldn't take an article seriously that started with the author claiming that code he writes by hand is "100% correct" Bruh
she*
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#18Couldn't take an article seriously that started with the author claiming that code he writes by hand is "100% correct" Bruh
I've gone back over most of my contributions to open source using LLMs and honestly, even though it was my best work at the time, there are big gaps that they find right away. The myth that we've been shipping perfect code for years, but you can't trust LLMs, is just subjective blindness. People can't see the issues that they can't see, definitionally. You can absolutely use the exact techniques we used to use in "th…
Likewise, I've found many bugs using LLMs in the small software libraries I hand wrote and considered complete and correct - even though it was my sole focus at the time and I thought I had perfected it
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#19Weirdly, I thought the terms would be reversed… I think of a craftsman as someone who values quality over quantity, and makes everything beautiful and long lasting, while an engineer is more about productivity and tolerances and efficiency. A craftsman makes better quality but doesn’t scale the way an engineer and the factory process does, although mass produced goods sacrifice quality for quantity.
Software is ephemeral.
Very little of it lasts for long. And if it does, it's legacy banking or some ossified terrible thing people are afraid to touch - not something revered.
Every piece of software today will be rewritten. By 2100 much of it will be dead and gone. Like punch cards that have rotted away.
Re: Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer
#20Weirdly, I thought the terms would be reversed… I think of a craftsman as someone who values quality over quantity, and makes everything beautiful and long lasting, while an engineer is more about productivity and tolerances and efficiency. A craftsman makes better quality but doesn’t scale the way an engineer and the factory process does, although mass produced goods sacrifice quality for quantity.
Software is ephemeral. Very little of it lasts for long. And if it does, it's legacy banking or some ossified terrible thing people are afraid to touch - not something revered. Every piece of software today will be rewritten. By 2100 much of it will be dead and gone. Like punch cards that have rotted away.
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