Charles insulted me. I fight back. Him say:
You are not a real programmer Cobb. Sure, you know something about programming, you took (and I assume excelled at?) some courses in undergrad a buncha years ago. But for many years now you've been essentially a (senior) business analyst, an excel/vba jockey (and if you call SQL a programming language, your hax0rz license is immediately and permanently revoked). Nothing wrong with that, I'm sure it can be challenging work, but to hang out a "Programmer" shingle...well, I think you have enough of a viewership that you should be mindful of the ol' Lincoln line that you can only fool some of the people some of the time (and, by garsh, if you now open your yap to say you only meant programmer in a metaphorical sense, i will reach into this screen and pinch your jowls reeally hard, mister).
I am too a programmer. I'm not a software engineer, which is to say I'm not a specialty programmer building some fraction of a software product in a highly controlled environment with codebase management and flunkies in QA. I'm an applications programmer, but I've forgotten more languages than most people learn, including lisp, fortran, ada, simula, vax assembler, 8080 assembler, apl, natural, javascript, mesa, cusp, and who knows how many 4GLs interpreted or compiled. I've learned and forgotten the Xerox XNS and LU 6.2 network stacks, HP, Interpress and Postscript print streams and who the hell knows what else. I was competent in Apollo Domain, Sunview, Xerox Loops, XDE as well as DOS, CP/M, VM/CMS, RSTS/E, TSO and JCL. I did programming in forwards and backwards chaining, object oriented, visual programming, top down and scripting... ah
It's true that I program old school. What puts me out to pasture are todays huge memory models. In my business, I don't need 'em and don't use 'em. So I'll never learn algorithms for video or audio streaming, transformations or any of that stuff. I never built hardware drivers. These days Just about all of my needs are met by scripting and while I've experimented with javascript, php, ruby, & java, I've never really needed more than the korn shell and perl. I build ETL by hand, rather like the 'This Old House' as compared to 'Extreme Makeover Home Edition'.
But I hate being a geek. I embrace my inner geek, but the ethics of making one's living that way are troubling. Geeks require, eventually, if their systems work, an ever increasing dependence on others to their systems, and I find that.. unbecoming and morally suspect.
I'm also not a weekend hacker. I don't program for fun, I think there is something fundamentally missing in my programming genes that gives me the yen to program for the sake of mastering the machine. It's a first order incentive that I simply don't possess any longer and I tend to think of it as an excess of youth. Sure, two Septembers ago when I got cut loose on an HP Superdome to run some benchmarks on 500 simultaneous databases, I got excited about what I could do, but yeah, if you ask me if I get goosebumps about configuring my own distro of Ubuntu the answer is hell no. I don't want to be Andre Watts, I want to own Avery Fisher Hall.
So now I'm an architect, and quite frankly even that's getting boring. I'm so ahead of the curve that I'm pissed off that only companies the size of IBM run systems comprehensive and large enough to entice me to think about working them. You picked, Charles, a very appropriate time to provoke me, and there are several other implications in this regard too. More on that later.
What I do have on that gene, is a pointer to another chromosome, that of literature. And it's a hard link upon which a great deal of code depends. I have to launch another instance of me (which requires me growing back my beard and wearing glasses all the time, instead of the goatee and contacts me as in the banner) in order to satisfy the geek hunger. Hell, I can remember that I wouldn't even bother to learn a language if I couldn't read the BNF description for it first. Even at this point I must confess regret for never mastering lex and yacc and building my own grammars, but I have to let that process die or at least go zombie.. argh.. a superposition of states. But literature forces a clearer kind of thinking, you get in trouble for obfuscation, it's a higher order syntax and there are so many more machines (people) who run your code. So I can still recall the days, while still at Xerox, I determined to let the C coding go, to write business software in order to express higher order desires through systems. And yet, while I appreciated the pure beauty of the logic of coding, I turned pointy-haired and started doing it for the money. You see, I worked for Xerox. Xerox. I was on a first name basis with the Xerox equivalents of Jobs and Wozniak, but despite all we had, there was no money to be made. The market was treacherous and I didn't understand it. So I abandoned the beauty of deep programming. The beauty I reserved for literature. Now I just care about the effectiveness of systems from an architectural perspective. I don't go back to that cave of the coder. It's like Bruce Wayne going back to innocence. Can't be done.
Today, the only thing that appeals to me on the deep gut level of coding beauty is crypto and security. One of the last programs I wrote in C, back in 1986, was a password cracker called ASKEW. I get sentimental thinking about it because I was deep into crosswords at the time, and so I was going to attach a crossword dictionary to it and build an indexing scheme for the first pass try before the brute force iterations. I had it in my mind that I had discovered stego too. That was going to be the next project, but then I met this girl... a different story.
I started programming in BASIC when I was 14 years old, it came to me without the benefit of an ethics or an understanding of what it might mean. It just seemed to be what the most logical kids did, like lemmas in Geometry. I saw the immediate parallel to language, and ultimately 12 years later I sold out to language. I had too much to say to people, I didn't want to spend my life talking to machines. I compromised and talked to people through machines, as I am doing now via paragraphs and essays and polemics, and as I do at work via scripts and databases and front-ends.
