Comment by bee_rider
3 years ago
Since we’re generally sitting on top of a giant pile of semi-understood abstraction that doesn’t have a real mathematical model and is often defined by matching legacy behavior (aka precedent), “Software Lawyer” could be a better name.
Naw, we should be honest about what we actually do, mostly so we can stop pretending our industry is good at what we do.
We are "Framework and API plumbers" by and large, taking existing packages and just hooking them into each other.
Plumbing generally works despite being constrained by real world non-idealities and things like wear-and-tear.
We belong with the lawyers, who are working in an entirely human constructed framework but have somehow fucked it up so bad that it has loopholes and undefined/unexpected behavior.
Is that not what we're doing with distributed systems? A lot of the theory & practice of our field is how to elegantly cope with servers dying, data being corrupted, load limits of single machines, etc. We have a lot of constraints.
And there's no possible way not to have some leaky abstractions with this in front of us.
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There is a large world of programmers outside of the Web world.