If it doesn't have an engine, or a motor, you're really not an "engineer". Also, there are these other people called engineers who do engineering, not programming.
On the same note, how did it come to be that every application program is now an "app"? Even the control panel programs are called "apps" in Windows now. Why not call it a "program" instead.
Stop using silly names for everything.
It's therefore fitting to call anyone who applies human ingenuity in a rigorous way to design and build tools, machines, and systems an "engineer".
But software engineering, as known today, is not what I would call rigorous. At times it pretends to be.
As for "apps", use of that term dates back at least to the early 1980s when there was talk of a "killer app" that would make PCs attractive to businesses. Typically, this was a spreadsheet: VisiCalc on Apple II, Lotus 1-2-3 on IBM and compatibles. But the iPhone put the word "app" into common vocabulary. "Apps" are distinguished by being standalone, relatively isolated from one another, and being launched by name from a table of app icons. Before that, and especially in the 90s, the goal was to abolish the concept of an application entirely; the hope of the "object-oriented desktop" was that third-party programs would function as seamlessly integrated extensions of the DE. OS/2 and perhaps Amiga came closest to this ideal among commercially available PC operating systems. Windows 3.1 had -- er, a table of app icons (Program Manager).
I don't expect that pointing this out on Hacker News is going to make much difference, any more than pointing out how stupid it is to call personnel "human resources" and then to decide that "human resources" will now become "HR", but let me point it out just the same.
Moreover, I don't think theres a big issue with using programmer or engineer, but I dont think that the word programmer is stigmatized but rather because its now an older term and not as recent as software engineer which is more trendier. You could think of it as how the word "phat" was used in hip hop to really just mean cool whereas nowadays kids would be confused to hear you use the word.
I think it speaks more of a change in the era where new words are considered cooler and just spread on their own, something that probably happens all the time, just like how young people adopt new slang.
In fact, if we switched the position of programmer and engineer in terms of how they were used in history where all programmers would be used to called engineers, maybe you would instead say that the word engineers is stigmatized.
>Engineering is the application of mathematics and scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge in order to invent, innovate, design, build, maintain, research, and improve structures, machines, tools, systems, components, materials, processes, solutions, and organizations.
>The discipline of engineering is extremely broad and encompasses a range of more specialized fields of engineering, each with a more specific emphasis on particular areas of applied science, technology and types of application.
>The term Engineering is derived from the Latin ingenium, meaning "cleverness" and ingeniare, meaning "to contrive, devise".
Software engineering fits this description in its own right. I think it's perfectly fair to call its practitioners engineers.