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The historical distinction between coder and programmer
It is a stock element in narratives of 1950s computing to distinguish between programmers and coders, the latter considered a “lowly technician” doing the routine job of converting flowcharts or pseudo-instructions into coded machine instructions (for example, see Campbell-Kelly et al.4 and Ensmenger7). This division of labor between coders and programmers is often overlaid with social distinctions of education and gender.7 Researching the early uses of the words “programming” and “coding,”5 however, we were confronted with the near absence of evidence for this coder/programmer distinction in practice.
It is a stock element in narratives of 1950s computing to distinguish between programmers and coders, the latter considered a “lowly technician” doing the routine job of converting flowcharts or pseudo-instructions into coded machine instructions (for example, see Campbell-Kelly et al. 4 and Ensmenger 7). There is a line that runs from Grace Hopper’s selling of “automatic coding” to today’s promises of large AI models such as Chat-GPT for revolutionizing computing by automating programming or even making human programmers obsolete. Get Involved By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.
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