🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <PCG.90Jul23164927@thor.cs.aber.ac.uk>, pcg@cs (Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
| I am not joking here; in the UK the BCS (the equivalent of the ACM) has
| been working very hard to make programming (at least, initially, in only
| certain cases) legal only for government (thru the BCS itself, of
| course) licensed programmers. Many Universities in the UK are very keen
| on this scheme because the best way (or even a requirement) to get a
| programmer's license would be having a CS degree from an "accredited" UK
| (foreigners need not apply...) University, with obvious implications.

Yow!  So, what happens when the line between "programmer" and
"end-user" is blurred.  Like, "programming" your VCR is rapidly
approaching the complexity of a ten-line BASIC program.  Will they
need licensed programmers to come in to set up the VCR?  (As if they
don't already... I've never seen anyone besides myself that doesn't
get it off the flashing-12:00!)

I mean, in some ways, programming is nothing more than "configuring it
until it does what you want it to", and some machines are orders of
magnitude more configurable than others.

BEGIN_GNU_RELEVANCE:

One of the things RMS seems to be espousing with the GNU philosophy is
"programming as an art"... that there are some for which hacking away
is as pleasurable as sex (and more frequent :-), and that the code
that such people produce should be freely shareable, like the trees
and the sky and the waterfalls.  This BCS thing really gets in the way
of that.  I'm sorry, but a piece of paper obtained politically is
never directly correlated with one's ability to do the job, just the
politics.  (Yeah, ask me whether my lack of college degree has ever
hurt my career.)

"When coding is outlawed, only outlaws will be coding..."

and where do I sign up for this League of Programming Freedom?  Maybe
I need to stuff myself there a little more prominently, now that I see
what it is for... :-)

Just another hacker (for more than two-thirds of my life now),
-- 
/=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ==========\
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