Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["David R. Matusiak" <dave AT matusiak.org>]

i think Ellen has a lot of interesting things to say, *especially* her 
observations of "our culture."  (our culture being the 
computing/engineering realm, that is.)  someone forwarded me this link 
a few months back and i had to comment that it was some of the most 
interesting reading i've done on the net in years.  not everyone agrees 
with her perspective, but it is interesting.

http://carbon.cudenver.edu/stc-link/engineering/engr3400/ullman.html

note the extra "L" in the page title (and first line of page).

has proofreading gone the way of the cute little Taco Bell dog?
/drm

On Monday, May 19, 2003, at 03:20  PM, Beckett wrote:

> 	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

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