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Comment by michaelfairley | Hacker News Reader

When someone says "I learned how to ride a bike over the weekend", the response is never "I don't see you doing tricks in a half-pipe, so you really only 'learned how to pedal down the street'. Don't call that learning how to ride a bike."

If "knowing how to code" means that you've built webapps, databases, embedded systems, mobile apps, operating systems, console games, and a compiler and mastered 19 programming languages, then very, very few people in world are coders.

Hacker News, stop being pedantic downers, and instead applaud someone for picking up a new skill in life (and trying to help others learn as well).

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I think that depending on one's perspective, one might consider this more analogous to claiming to ride a bike, but as it transpires, you only learned how to ride a bike with training wheels. You can write the analogy however you like to make it suit the point you're trying to make.

I don't think it's unreasonable for folks to suggest that "Build web apps" is maybe a more apt title than "code" for what's described here. It would not harm this well-intentioned and well-executed article to do so.

The problem is one of terminology. But ignoring that issue doesn't make it go away.

People talk about "coding" or "programming" or "software engineering" as if such simple terms can encompass the huge range of complexities involved.

Coding is on the same scale as, say, carpentry. One might say "I learned carpentry over the weekend" and it would be obvious that what was meant was "I learned some small amount of wood working over the weekend" rather than "I became a master carpenter over the weekend".

Agreed. A lot of pedantry and smartest-person-in-the-room-ism going on here. People around here seem so jaded. Out in the real world (ie not Silicon Valley) a professional programmer graduates from a CS or CIS program, gets a job doing mindless coding somewhere like in a local government building and writes ASP, .NET, or some form of C all day. They get decent at like 3 languages, stagnate, and become dinosaurs. That's why so many systems suck when those guys retire and the new guys come in. I think that sucks and it should be avoided but my point is, what does make you a real coder/programmer/whatever you want to call it? Is it getting paid or is it knowing the ins and outs of the latest cool-new-thing? Because that's what it seems like everyone is getting at. I have a deep respect for everyone here who I know knows far more than I could hope to know but at this moment I'm a little disgusted by how out of touch everyone seems. I'd submit that there is a definition of a "real" coder but unfortunately it cannot be quantified. You know it when you see it. There's a combination of subjective skill, clout, and aloofness that quantifies the kind of real programmer touted around here but in the real world they're a lot like the cheap guys in India that a lot of people like to deride. I didn't know programmers could be such snooty hipsters.

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