Comment by globnomulous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by globnomulous | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not just confident; I'm saying it is objectively true and demonstrable that (a) "their programmer's editor" is a solecism and (b) "programmer's editor" is equally wrong by being clunky, unidiomatic usage that any competent editor would mark as incorrect.

I assume you see that "their programmer's editor" is obviously wrong, so I'll skip it.

Finding a product named Programmer's Editor doesn't support the claim that "programmer's editor" is natural, normal, idiomatic English (and the author of the program by that name, in addition to being weirdly incapable of even correctly defining "programmer," isn't clearly a native speaker). Quite the contrary. You wouldn't name a program Code Editor, IDE, Editor, or Text Editor, just as you wouldn't name a company or a line of products Computers, because these are too generic to be used as proper nouns.

And the ngram of "programmer's editor" speaks for itself: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=programmer%27s...

To the best of my knowledge, at no time in the history of English has "programmer's editor" been idiomatic English, either inside or outside of the world of software and engineering. And today, in late 2024, it is unarguably incorrect usage, regardless of its history.

What do you think about:

* Chef's Knife

* Painter's Palette

* Carpenter's Toolbelt

* Teacher's Guide

...

They are all terms that work in a similar way: they qualify the name of a tool or object by the profession of who's using it.

The qualifier mattes. A Teacher's Guide is not just a guide that happens to be owned by a teacher. A chef's knife is not whatever knife a chef happens to be using.

The reason this feels outdated or "wrong" when applied to the job of "peogrammers" very likely has less to do with English grammar or whether "programmer's editor" per se is idiomatic or not rather than the fact that the name "programmer" to denote the profession of who writes computer programs has fallen out of favour.

Take a quick look at LinkedIn and you'll rarely see people using the title "programmer" and rather use "developer" or "software engineer". Some people even use "builder".

The words "developer" and "builder" are still actively used on some parts of the anglosphere to denote people who build buildings.

The demise of the word programmer is interesting. Is it because it got associated with a boring cubicle job, devoid of any creativity?

In any case, within a given profession you don't quite need the qualifier.

Chefs will ask they colleagues to fetch a knife, not a Chef's knife

A painter will grab a palette, not a painter's palette.

The professional qualifier is obviously redundant when you're talking inside the circle of a given profession. So it's entirely expected to "sound weird" if we refer to an editor as programmer's editor when we're in a forum of software developers.

My point is that it's not wrong in the sense you're making it out to be wrong.

Yes it's an unnecessary qualifier. But so what.

If it helps any, I wrote "programmer's editor" because I was trying to disambiguate between things like emacs and ms word. I'd consider both editors, but I find it much easier to write text documents meant for human consumption.

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