Sunday, December 10, 2006

What is programming?

A slightly philosophical title, which will no doubt end up with a lot of introspection, reflection and sole-searching (no really, looking at the bottom of our shoes and trying to extract meaning from a piece of chewing gum). Why ask the question? A little thought skittered across my brain and went something like this: "Does writing a function in an Excel spreadsheet consitute programming?"

This thought was closely followed by a number of other thoughts, such as, is writing HTML programming? what about if we use a tool such as Dreamweaver? Hey, even more bizarre - can the creation of a Word document be called programming? I mean after all in Office 2003/2007 saving the file creates XML, and so does Dreamweaver. Let's face it this is clearly absurd, right?

Ok, lets separate the tools we use, the output data we create and our thought process.

Does the tool maketh the programmer? - Nope, this should be obvious, as even a monkey could use some of the Visual tools out there and still have no idea what they are doing.

Does doing maths make you a Mathematician? - Nope again, although we may generate sums and equations it certainly doesn't mean we could qualify ourselves as numerate. But, just maybe this does mean we need to introduce a sliding scale of programming ability, the idea of programmerness or how much of a programmer are you? Let's face it Excel provides many levels of abstraction that allow you to use the sum function on a column of numbers in the same way Java abstracts away from assembly.

Our thought process - so maybe it is purely our ability to comprehend a problem and provide a software based solution that differentiates us as programmers.

In the end, this means that we as programmers can argue as much as we like about the merits of language X over language Y, but using a particular language does not imply that we are better than the complete dorks programming in Perl, which is disgustingly horrible to read and only a no-brainer would even try :-) Moving on, maybe, just maybe, we should be striving, nay, moving mountains to provide the best software we can by understanding the many different ideas in different languages.

And, a note from my wife, who avoids anything technical like the plague - there's an art to it!

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