Not justifying anything. But wasn't early programming two distinct tasks?
1. Writing the Program(On Paper).
2. Feeding the program to the computer.
People in 2. were called 'Programmers' because that is what they did literally- 'Program the machine'. Also early programming had all sorts strange situations where a large part of programming was actually getting results by plugging values in largish math formulas. So there were a range of people who did just that. Generating graphs, being the human equivalent of source control etc.
The 2. part wasn't exactly a very glorifying role and was more like borderline stenographer.
By some definition that is still true. Notice how many programmers there are who probably write MVP web apps for a living copying code from stackoverflow/internet, but there are also people doing all the real work thinking about stock markets, security, medical devices, writing compiler patches, building tools.
I've always thought as coding as a mere ritual the real work always happens on the paper.
This was my understanding too. Women were given the the enormous and tedious task of transcribing programs onto punch cards and such. It required a large "typing pool", much like secretarial pools preparing letters dictated by others.
1. Writing the Program(On Paper).
2. Feeding the program to the computer.
People in 2. were called 'Programmers' because that is what they did literally- 'Program the machine'. Also early programming had all sorts strange situations where a large part of programming was actually getting results by plugging values in largish math formulas. So there were a range of people who did just that. Generating graphs, being the human equivalent of source control etc.
The 2. part wasn't exactly a very glorifying role and was more like borderline stenographer.
By some definition that is still true. Notice how many programmers there are who probably write MVP web apps for a living copying code from stackoverflow/internet, but there are also people doing all the real work thinking about stock markets, security, medical devices, writing compiler patches, building tools.
I've always thought as coding as a mere ritual the real work always happens on the paper.