
Why should the best engineers in the world come to Canada? - virtuabhi
https://www.quora.com/Why-should-the-best-engineers-in-the-world-come-to-Canada/answer/Justin-Trudeau?srid=ufGRM&share=1
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Safety1stClyde
Could we go back to calling computer programmers computer programmers?

If it doesn't have an engine, or a motor, you're really not an "engineer".
Also, there are these other people called engineers who do engineering, not
programming.

On the same note, how did it come to be that every application program is now
an "app"? Even the control panel programs are called "apps" in Windows now.
Why not call it a "program" instead.

Stop using silly names for everything.

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bitwize
I agree with you, but the words "engine" and "engineer" both come from the
same word as "ingenuity". Before the 20th century or so, an engine meant any
device or machine, not just e.g., steam engines, internal-combustion engines,
etc.

It's therefore fitting to call anyone who applies human ingenuity in a
rigorous way to design and build tools, machines, and systems an "engineer".

But software engineering, as known today, is not what I would call rigorous.
At times it pretends to be.

As for "apps", use of that term dates back at least to the early 1980s when
there was talk of a "killer app" that would make PCs attractive to businesses.
Typically, this was a spreadsheet: VisiCalc on Apple II, Lotus 1-2-3 on IBM
and compatibles. But the iPhone put the word "app" into common vocabulary.
"Apps" are distinguished by being standalone, relatively isolated from one
another, and being launched by name from a table of app icons. Before that,
and especially in the 90s, the goal was to abolish the concept of an
application entirely; the hope of the "object-oriented desktop" was that
third-party programs would function as seamlessly integrated extensions of the
DE. OS/2 and perhaps Amiga came closest to this ideal among commercially
available PC operating systems. Windows 3.1 had -- er, a table of app icons
(Program Manager).

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Safety1stClyde
Redesignating programmers as "engineers", or "developers", or "coders", or
whatever the flavour-of-the-month description is, is most likely to be due to
some perceived stigma with the words "computer programmer". It's just plain
ridiculous to keep renaming a job to make it sound trendier, especially when
the thing that a person does, writing instructions for a computer to follow,
is perfectly and succinctly described by the words "programmer".

I don't expect that pointing this out on Hacker News is going to make much
difference, any more than pointing out how stupid it is to call personnel
"human resources" and then to decide that "human resources" will now become
"HR", but let me point it out just the same.

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forkLding
I think my software engineering undergrad course summarized it up, and they
emphasized the difference between soft eng and programming with that you can
really can call any form of programming as really just playing with or
handling code whereas engineering involves licensing, researching techniques
that involve optimized solutions and moreover adherence to some form of moral
engineering ethics that might not be written as part of law.

Moreover, I don't think theres a big issue with using programmer or engineer,
but I dont think that the word programmer is stigmatized but rather because
its now an older term and not as recent as software engineer which is more
trendier. You could think of it as how the word "phat" was used in hip hop to
really just mean cool whereas nowadays kids would be confused to hear you use
the word.

I think it speaks more of a change in the era where new words are considered
cooler and just spread on their own, something that probably happens all the
time, just like how young people adopt new slang.

In fact, if we switched the position of programmer and engineer in terms of
how they were used in history where all programmers would be used to called
engineers, maybe you would instead say that the word engineers is stigmatized.

