Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Conference on Software Engineering in 1968 portrayed computer
programming as being “too artistic,” they was using the word in this
latter sense, as a rhetorical device for contrasting its “backward” craft
sensibilities with “the types of theoretical foundations and practical
disciplines” that they believed characterized “the established branches
of engineering.”
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Note that the appeal here is to the tradition of the
artisan or craftsperson, which is a masculine identity, rather than to the
potentially effeminate artsy type.
For those computer programmers who also had academic aspirations,
the word art was always used in opposition to science. For them the
word suggested an undesirable lack of theoretical or mathematical rigor.
They needed to distance the more artistic practices of programming from
the more respectable discipline of computer science. This often brought
these academically minded proto-computer scientists into confl ict with
working programmers, who had different professional and occupational
agendas. The differences between these agendas would come to light in
subsequent debates about programmer recruitment practices, program-
ming language adoption, and academic curriculum.
