I think I'll kill two birds with this stone. At RIT, there are two main computing majors: Computer Science and Software Engineering. Both of these are misnomers.
See, Computer Science is concerned primarily with programming as it relates to computing theory. Programming, while certainly related to the design of (reasonably) precise things, is by no means scientific. Science is systematic, rigorous, testable, and predictable. Computer hardware and software alike operate under the illusion of determinism and reliability for the sake of pragmatism alone.
Further, computing theory is only related to computing insofar as programmers actually implement the mathematical ideas of the theorists. Research is valueless without eventual application.
Software Engineering, on the other hand, is concerned with programming in the context of project management. It asks what the process is (or ought to be) for creating software in teams of people according to business requirements. Software engineers also operate under an illusion of determinism and reliability, but their misplaced faith is not in computers—instead their money is on programmers. The fool and his money have parted.
So computers are fallible, and programmers are fallible, and it's a wonder any of us ever gets anything done at all. The best programmers know the secret of how things are really done in the software world: communication.
I don't mean meetings, or agile (or worse, Agile), or documentation, or any of dozens of other borderline buzzwords that a manager might throw around. No, I mean the plain and simple fact that programming is writing, and programmers have the unique task among authors of writing in such a way that both computers and humans can readily parse and evaluate their work.
Of course, any fool can write for one or the other. If I write an informal description of an algorithm on paper, it's perfectly human-readable; if I write a formal implementation of an algorithm in heavily optimised machine code, then it's perfectly computer-readable.
And this is why I hate the word code. If you call it “coding” for a computer, then the quality of your writing from a human perspective is probably utter trash. Don't get me wrong, of course: for a first draft, utter trash is perfectly acceptable provided it can still convey the intended meaning.
But for a final draft, a certain amount of editing is necessary. Programmers differs from writing in another key aspect: though neither a program nor a work of prose is ever truly complete (final draft is an oxymoron as well), you must release both sometime; the difference is that a program, like a work of nonfiction, can be updated in editions to maintain freshness and currency.
Programming is like creating a diamond from scratch. When you code, you make the stone. You may then polish what's there and cut what shouldn't be, but both the colour and the clarity of that stone are immutable. No amount of refactoring will fix an idea that was poorly styled or unclear from the outset.
In conclusion, I might add that I insist that programming is not art. I believe this simply because I'm not good at art, but I am good at programming. I'm also good at design and craft, and that's what I believe programming is.
Programming is writing for one audience who seemingly doesn't understand you but is also endlessly critical, and simultaneously for another who seemingly understands you but is also painfully literal. It is writing manuals and dictionaries and phrasebooks to help these two disparate audiences communicate. It's logical, illogical, philological, analogical, anthropological, and frequently epistemological.
I fucking love it.
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