<various fighting about "software programmer" vs. "hardware programmer>
How about just "programmer", then? "Hardware programmer" vs. "software programmer", to me, makes a false distinction. I suppose a "software programmer" might make sense if you're writing assembler code for a non-existent hardware architecture (mayhap the millicode folks are thus software programmers?), but I could equally plausibly argue that those folks are "hardware programmers", I suspect. "Computer programmer" would, to me, be the "mostest correctest"(tm) term, but that seems redundant nowadays. Perhaps "programmer" is the opposite of a retronym <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retronym> (a pronym?): forty years ago, nobody outside of the data center (or data centre) knew what a "programmer" was, so you'd have to say "computer programmer". Nowadays, of course, you can just say "programmer" and nobody bats an eye. And so the language evolves. ...phsiii
