I think there are several different axes one can split programmer culture down (which may or may not be orthogonal).
Brian Beckman explained one such axis, as an aside, in "Don't fear the Monad" [1], about two differing views that born in the '70s and split two programmers into two camps:
The bottom-up people, and the top-down people:
- The bottom-up people start with the hardware and only add abstractions and trade performance where necessary (fortran, c, java)
- The top-down people started with perfect abstraction/logic and reduced/removed abstraction to get access to the hardware and performance where necessary (lisp, ml, haskell)
What is interesting these days, is that these two camps are trying to steal more and more ideas from each other [2]
Computer Science vs. Software Engineering; although usually the label "Computer Science" is applied to both.
Paraphrasing the PDF:
Loosely speaking, I mean the distinction between programmers who regard their central aim as being to solve problems, and those who are more concerned with building and
understanding theories... If you are unsure to
which class you belong, then consider the following two statements.
(i) The point of solving problems is to understand computation better.
(ii) The point of understanding computation is to become better able to solve problems.
Here (i) corresponds to Computer Science and (ii) to Software Engineering.
> If you are unsure to which class you belong, then consider the following two statements. (i) The point of solving problems is to understand computation better. (ii) The point of understanding computation is to become better able to solve problems.
Like the original statement in the article, your paraphrasing strikes me as being egg and chicken. I think most mathematicians and hackers would sit on the fence.
