So what's your arbitrary criteria for actually being a programmer?

Not arbitrary. Spend time at it. Get proficient.

In my experience, a first year programming does not a programmer make. It lays the foundation, but it doesn't get you there.

My old manager who spent a year writing JCL and then moved into management? He might have been a programmer at one point, but he had long since stopped by the time I knew him.

Me, I haven't written code in several years. And I'm not sure I'd consider myself a programmer any more.

I think we need to take a serious look at the "many eyes" theory because of this. Apparently, there were no eyes on the part of parties that did not wish to exploit the bug for close to two years. And wasn't there just a professional audit by Red Hat that caught another bug, but not this one?

I have to say I'm even less confident in the plan to couple it to DNSSEC.

Sure. We're better. But we need to be even better than that.

I'd say more than just the "community". We have a great many companies that incorporate this software and generate billions from the sales of applications or services incorporating it, without returning anything to its maintenance.I think it's a sensible thing to ask Intuit, for example: "What did you pay to help maintain OpenSSL?". And then go down the list of companies.

OK guys. We've promoted Open Source for decades. We have to own up to our own problems.

This was a failure in the Open Source process. It is just as likely to happen to closed source software, and more likely to go unrevealed if it does, which is why we aren't already having our heads handed to us.

But we need to look at whether Open Source projects should be providing the world's security without any significant funding to do so.

Depends on the consequences of something bad happening.

Finding out the next flavor of Ben and Gerry's ice cream? Not such a big deal.

Finding out exactly where you can strike critical infrastructure by getting your report about how vulnerable the critical infrastructure is? Absolutely.

If you knew that the information was sensitive, and you didn't safeguard it ... then, I would argue you really missed the point.

A programmer is one who programs. Write a program: You're a programmer now.

So, if I get you to tighten a bolt, are you a mechanical engineer? If I scribble on a piece of paper am I an artist? If I add two numbers am I mathematician? Does putting on a bandaid make me a doctor?

I think not.

Write a program, and that's all you've done. Write a bunch of programs and demonstrate some proficiency at it, and then you can be a programmer. Same as with anything else.

"we need more girls in STEM" article recently. Why? Why do we need more girls in STEM, or everybody to be programmers?

Honest answer? Because it offends people's sensibilities that what are being hailed as the lucrative jobs and the future of the economy aren't being pursued by a large chunk of the population.

I know them all. They all work in Marketing.

No, a couple are in HR as well, and there is at least one in the Finance department. Some days I'm not so sure about IT.

Have you ever been told you need to submit accurate time sheets for the week on Wednesdays? How the hell do you expect me to give you accurate timesheets for the entire week on a Wednesday when I usually work Wednesday and Friday evenings for an unknown period of time??? And if I had to submit it on Wednesday, don't grumble that I had to submit a correction on Monday to come up with the real number.

But, I digress. ;-)

Just cause its art doesn't prevent it from being an eyesore.

So, you're categorically saying all graffiti is an eye sore? You've seen all of the graffiti in the world and concluded none of it has merit? You've discounted the possibility that people have asked people to put up murals in some places?

Wow, you are good. What's it like to be omniscient? Did you know I was going to ask that?

Just because people collect it doesn't make these eyesore art or these vandals artists.

Just because you don't like it doesn't prevent it from being art.

There has been graffiti for thousands of years in one form or another, and there will continue to be. Hell, cave paintings can be considered some of the first forms of graffiti.

There are places which have dedicated graffiti walls, because some of the art is pretty damned incredible.

Does changing it from being on a wall where you have permission magically turn it into art? Or does it just make it legitimate vandalism?

Graffiti and tagging are destructive acts, only slightly better than tossing a rock through a window.

Meh, by the time you learn to be one of these 'muralists' you've gone through a lot of bad graffiti.

Sometimes graffiti is political or culturally significant (think "Eric Clapton is God"), and has been with us since the ancient Greeks. It's not likely to go away.

Dunno, but I think law enforcement should ideally be held to a higher standard than someone running around calling themselves the Japanese word for breaded pork tenderloin.

So, what do we infer about a poster calling themselves 'interkin3tic'?

Does this convey credibility to you? Or should we discount your opinion as that of someone who has allowed l337 speak to become a factor in his life?

They're taggers, it's not like they're doing art now either.

Don't confuse "tagging" with "graffiti".

Tagging requires neither skill nor talent and is done by bored kids who think they're gang members.

Actual graffiti artists (think Banksy) can create some really good pieces which people actually collect.

Some graffiti artists have some pretty mad skills, and create some really good pieces.

If you teach someone to program, by definition they'll be a programmer.

Not really. Not by a long shot.

I can teach you to take a photograph, that doesn't make you a photographer.

You can teach someone the concept of coding, and they might even make a couple of simple programs.

That doesn't make you a 'programmer' any more than giving someone a driving lesson makes them a race car driver.

I've encountered people who could, in some ways, write code. But since they didn't have the slightest idea of how to do it well or effectively, they were dangerous amateurs who believed they were programmers. We had one guy (lasted less than a month) who wrote garbage code like a first year student with no real understanding. Trying to make him understand the difference between what he wrote and what we needed was futile. I eventually walked away from him, told him he was useless, and stopped giving him tasks. My manager, upon seeing his code, went the next step and got rid of him

Trust me. In practice, there is a very large difference between "knowing how to write some code 'n stuff" and actually being proficient at designing, writing, and maintaining software.

Hell, I've know a few people with Masters degrees in CS who are actually terrible programmers. They can make something which kinda works for their area of research, but in general, they were useless.

I even knew one guy who said he had a Masters in CS who had never coded before -- how that happened boggles my mind. That's like being a chemist who has never been in a lab.