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  • Looking for an attribution

    From matt.jaffe@gmail.com@21:1/5 to All on Fri May 5 10:39:41 2023
    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.

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  • From Julio Di Egidio@21:1/5 to matt....@gmail.com on Fri May 5 23:27:09 2023
    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

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