Difference between a Programming Language User and a Programmer

The contents of this article may not come as a surprise to most but still I just had put it out there.Many people are of the mistaken opinion that as long as you study a programming language you have become a programmer. I hope this article which builds upon my meager experience in College can open the eyes of many people.

As long as you know the basic syntax and form of writing in a particular Programming language you are a PLU. I have seen many such cases during my education in College. Some are extraordinary in the fact that they are able to memorize programs without missing a single semicolon and write it out during our labs and exams.

Programmers in my opinion are people who are able to see the logic needed to do a particular function and are able to use their knowledge in the Programming language to either write a program from scratch or get already written portions to work together after appropriate changes are made.

The problem which plagued the most of the PLUs in my campus was that they had a non computer science specialization during high school. Others were just lazy. I am not denigrating PLUs since they are able to mass produce standard programs in a blink of time compared to their programming contemporaries.

And sometimes programmers tend to have varied logic for the same problem which most of the times tends towards non standardization and needless complexity.

If a wheel exists just use it instead of reinventing it.

Sometimes programmers tend to forget it while PLUs are at the other end of the extreme.

I also classify just programmers and good programmers with an analogy of a person giving directions.

A programmers tends to use landmarks which are easily visible to point out the way while a good programmer just tends to say the distance moved forward before taking the turn. Since a programmer is instructing a computer the latter is easily compared to the former.

I hope this article has resonated with many people who might have had the same experience in their professional or otherwise education. This can also serve as an explanation for laymen who are new to the field.