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in reply to Software engineering: a useless profession?

(I)f you are a software engineer, you will ...

...get computers to do tedious bullshit for me, like reminding me to pay bills and keep appointments (cron and Perl), check programming assignments for correctness (CVS and Perl, although that was two jobs ago), catalogue my books and CDs (PostgreSQL and, er, Perl); the list goes on.

The programmer's task is to make computers do the stupid boring stuff, and there's more than enough stupid boring stuff to go around.

--
Yours in pedantry,
F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
"Anything you put in comments is not tested and easily goes out of date." -- tye

  • Comment on Re: Software engineering: a useless profession?

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Re^2: Software engineering: a useless profession?
by perlcapt (Pilgrim) on Nov 06, 2004 at 03:24 UTC
    FoxtrotUniform, I think you have started the thread to a new definition of software engineer:

    A software engineer's job is to create brilliant and exciting ways for computers to do stupid boring stuff.

    Has that been said before? Who cares; it kinda rolls off the tongue ;-)

    perlcapt
    -ben
[reply]
      A software engineer's job is to create brilliant and exciting ways for computers to do stupid boring stuff.

      Brilliant and exciting? Fun though that is, I'd settle for effective. Probably easier to debug, anyhow. :-)

      --
      Yours in pedantry,
      F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
      "Anything you put in comments is not tested and easily goes out of date." -- tye

[reply]
        A software engineer's job is to create brilliant and exciting ways for computers to do stupid boring stuff.

        I hope you realize I'm not really serious. This comment comes from one of the most astonishing comments from an architecture professor when I was in school. I had complained that the design he had drawn on the board was physically impossible to build with the technolgy of the day. His response was that it was an architect's job to make interesting problems for engineers. Can you believe it!

        perlcapt
        -ben
[reply]

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