> Most "programmers" aren't programmers.
So if you're paid to write programs you probably aren't a professional programmer? What's wrong with an operational definition?
So if you're paid to write programs you probably aren't a professional programmer? What's wrong with an operational definition?
There's a field with a similar problem to our own: public-school teaching. Teacher performance isn't quantified, and so teachers can pretty much get away with only being as good at imparting knowledge as any random member of the population--even though they took years of education-in-Education. Most "teachers" aren't teachers, any more than I'm a teacher; they're simply people paid to repeatedly attempt (and fail) to be teachers.†
We pay a lot of people to repeatedly attempt (and fail) to be programmers.
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† Teachers' unions are right now fighting the introduction of actual metrics on how a student's achievement level's year-over-year velocity is affected by a teacher relative to the average of their peer-teachers in the same school. They are fighting this because the data clearly shows a bimodal distribution, where a lot of people are just extremely unfit to be teachers--their students actually reaching negative learning velocities by their presence in the class--and until now, the unions protected these people, since there was nothing to prove they sucked so very much. It's hard to go back on your decision to defend someone when you later find out that they're indefensible.
(Apologies for the totally off-topic response to your only mostly off-topic comment.)
I like where you were going on programming though.
We would unionize and be fighting metrics too, if they tried to measure how good a programmer you were with the number of goto's you use.
However, if you believe that there is any empirically-detectable property that makes a someone a better programmer when they have more of it, then "programmer" is a natural category, not an artificial one. It's something where, if we washed away the word for it, we'd end up re-creating the word, as a handle to describe that obvious cluster of things which are unlike other things but like one-another. Being a programmer has phenomenological consequences--you can determine who is or isn't a programmer using games or tests which don't have anything to do with programming trivia, and without mentioning that "potential for ability to program" is what you're testing for.
In any natural category, you'll have false negatives and false positives: things that are identified as X but don't have the property that puts them in the X natural-category, and things that aren't identified as X, but which do have the property.
There are many False Programmers. There are also False Not-Programmers: people who don't think, or know, that they're programmers, but who are nevertheless. This is true of every natural category. There are people who think they can sing but can't, and people who think they can't sing but can.
There are professional singers who can't sing, even though they "are" singing. When we say "can sing", we imply the edifice of a market, and competition; we really mean "can sing to a level where we'd pay them more for their singing than a randomly-selected member of the population." In other words, they "can sing objectively-well."
There are people who "can program objectively-well." They are, in the terms of the natural category, both the True Programmers, and the False Not-Programmers. There is no fallacy at work.
From the linked homepage:
>> We (Saeed Dehnadi, Richard Bornat) have discovered a test
>> which divides programming sheep from non-programming goats.
>> This test predicts ability to program with very high accuracy
>> before the subjects have ever seen a program or a programming language.