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[Beckett <thomas AT tbeckett.com>]

	There's a great interview on Salon this week with Ellen Ullman, a 
software engineer who has a new novel out that centers around debugging 
code.  I haven't seen the book, but the interview itself contains a lot 
of interesting and intelligent observations about the nature of writing 
software, and touches on a lot of other things as well, from 
storytelling to open source.

        I commend it to y'all.

TaB

Excerpt:
"Engineer" used to mean people who were working kernel-level or lower -- 
it referred to a level of code one was writing. If you were writing in 
the application space you were a programmer, and if you were writing in 
the system space you were an engineer. And there was some merit to that 
distinction. The application space has now become so complicated mainly 
because of all the incredible energy that's gone into the user interface.

So the term "engineer" just began to leak across the divide. It reflects 
the desire to try to see it all as a scientific process. But it's right 
in one respect: You want to build something. Engineering implies a kind 
of tinkering, building mentality: Let's get to work, let's get it to 
work. It's not about designing the most elegant machine, it's not art. 
The goal of engineering is to build something that works. And I think 
that's very much the motive in programming.


http://www.salon.com/books/int/2003/05/16/ullman/index.html