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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

Weirdly, 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.

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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.

I think this dissonance is because people currently equate the engineering with profit optimization, as were already pretty deep into the capitalism "endgame".

But in the first phase of industrialization, the quality went up - exactly because we suddenly had specific measurements and tolerances.

The markets however did what they do best: optimize for profit. And the public markets preferred cheap over quality... At least in the consumer space. Objectively quality has significantly improved across the board with every decade. Just not in consumer goods, because of their consistent spending habits

So in my mind a craftsman is something akin to an artist. Whereas an engineer provides solutions.

A craftsman differs from an artist in exactly this: an artist produces beauty while a craftsman produces an artifact that serves its purpose beautifully and robustly. The two can be combined, of course.

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.

Games

I share the sentiment as a gamer but according to preservationists the majority of games have already been lost to history.

Is this really true? Or are we counting like the games kids made in a computer lab somewhere.

Or there's this 87% number, but it's based on "no longer a legal way to buy it," not that it's not archived/preserved: https://gamehistory.org/87percent/

> Or are we counting like the games kids made in a computer lab somewhere.

We don't have to count amateur projects but the commercial releases in the US is not the entirety of the gaming history. There are other countries with their own rich gaming histories and other platforms (e.g. browser, mobile) that don't get the same attention as American releases for PC or popular consoles.

I cannot play a single game from my childhood, they were early flash games "for girls" and they were not in English. Nobody archived those.

Your bank's mainframe would like to know your location.

survivorship bias. while something like 20% of code in production today runs on mainframes, that probably represents <0.1% of all code ever written

Good software runs for decades without maintenance. And by 2100, most of us will be gone.

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

Agreed. In my view, using AI to write code is neither engineering nor craftsmanship, but an abrogation of the responsibility to deliver a quality product. It isn’t engineering, it’s management, and these days (given the quantity of code agents spew out) it’s management without responsible oversight. Seriously, I’m distressed at how the industry is drinking the poison kool-aid.

In food contexts when I see "artisinal" I usually just think of rich white people buying the same stuff in nicer packaging and typography for twice the price.

The actual artisans don't need to advertise themselves as artisans, they just sell shit.

Actual artisans largely make "shit" and mostly leave the selling to others.

There are always exceptions, of course, and people that seek out crafted goods often want to climb over counters and into workshops .. but the crafting time tends to outweigh the selling time by a magnitude or two.

The true crossovers are the artisans that make crafting a performance and sell by making, eg: Lino Tagliapietra - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luU1mlCZc8U

How constructive to make this... racial.

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