You say Potato...

The clock is ticking as I approach departure time; the morning has come with questions of what I think the differences between a Coder, a Programmer, a Software Developer a Software engineer and a computer Scientist are.

A coder:

I think a coder is just a fellow who simply writes code, any type of code. For a hobby, for kicks or for a little bit of money. Work from coders generally would be likened to a street fighter's prowess in fighting-Raw,

Brute-force and sometimes inefficient. But one thing is for certain he has passion.

A Programmer:

A programmer, on the other hand, is a coder who kinda went to class a bit. A programmer knows about data structures, the difference between bubble sort and quick sort, OO techniques i.e. Polymorphism, modularity encapsulation, why not to use "GO TO" statements. This fellow can be equated to a street fighter who went to a Dojo and was taught the art of war. He is more elegant yet passionate. He/she is better equipped to do damage. He/she works alone so does not get the usual team benefits. But has the benefit of working from system analysis, design, coding, QA and deployment. So he can become an all rounder. He resides in companies that have software development is not the core process.

A Software Developer:

Well this is a programmer in a larger team; he sticks to the implementation of a design or the interpretation of a Requirement to a code design. A Developer writes Components and not the whole program. Software developers are also concerned with Version Control, Build Process. Software developers also experience team benefits and thus slowly get to trust the other developers in the team. They basically reside in companies that have software development as their core duty. The analogy is that of a street fighter whose gone to a Dojo then later joined the Justice League as Batman.

A Software engineer:

This is a glorified name for a Software developer who has hang around the development circles for a while. He is the old Batman in Batman of the future; he gives experience to the younger developers in order for them to avoid pitfalls that cost him.

A Computer scientist:

These are folks that went through a computer science course, they think about optimizing algorithms, low level memory operations e.t.c. they may or may not have programming tendencies. he/she is seldom involved in the 'crunching' of requirements to make code- they consider that work to mundane and repetitive and when they do get involved they operate only as 'consultants'. He thinks Visual basic and any other Microsoft software development product are verbose and thus is a “Waste of their Fries”, they are obsessed with put “semi colons” at the end of each line. Using the fighting analogy, this is the “Master” in a dojo, always finding ways of validating himself and criticizing the street fighter. He ends up being a lecturer.

So you might ask who I am. I am a software developer, at least to my definition.