Looking for an attribution

[matt....@gmail.com]

Jobst Brandt once said: "Those who think a programmer and a software engineer are the same, might also believe there is no difference between a mechanic and a mechanical engineer or electrician and an electrical engineer." I ran across that quotation decades ago in what was then a Usenet group, but I can't find it in the Google Groups archives. I'm including it in a paper I'm writing and would like to attribute it correctly. Does anyone have a good source of that quotation for me? Thanks in advance.

[Julio Di Egidio]

On Friday, 5 May 2023 at 19:39:43 UTC+2, matt....@gmail.com wrote:

> Jobst Brandt once said: "Those who think a programmer and a software engineer are the same, might also believe there is no difference between a mechanic and a mechanical engineer or electrician and an electrical engineer."

And yet that is more misleading than it is helpful: there is no such thing as a "mechanic" in our field (although by now it's a cesspool of charlatans and saboteurs, but that's another story), programming is simply the first step in a software engineering curriculum.

*Software engineering is the most complex engineering that there is, and not even Einstein could outguess it*: wright that on your wall, and that it takes some 20(!) years to become just reasonably competent on the whole SDLC, provided one has been working carefully and diligently for all that time...

Julio

[olcott]

The key difference between a programmer and a software engineer (I am
the latter) is that a COBOL programmer may create or modify a data
processing system such as one that computes payroll. A software engineer
will create operating systems and compilers. I created the X86UTM
operating system to host my partial halt decider.

--
Copyright 2023 Olcott "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius
hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer