Quote:Original post by Serapth No the AP above nailed it, there is a difference between a systems programmer and a system programmer. One actually creates systems, the other works within them. Linus is a systems programmer, I am a system programmer using the linux system.
By this ludicrous definition, everyone who writes programs for Linux is a "system programmer," which makes "system programmer" a meaningless term, doesn't it?
Quote:Original post by Serapth No the AP above nailed it, there is a difference between a systems programmer and a system programmer. One actually creates systems, the other works within them. Linus is a systems programmer, I am a system programmer using the linux system.
By this ludicrous definition, everyone who writes programs for Linux is a "system programmer," which makes "system programmer" a meaningless term, doesn't it?
No, not everyone. The only programmers on Linux that would be system programmers are the people building linux itself. For example, kernal developers would by systems programmers, while application developers would be system programmers.
Hey, I never made the difference... english is a screwy language. But there is a definate difference between the two.
While wikipedia interestingly doesn't differentiate between the two terms either (in fact, "Systems Programming" redirects to "System Programming", but hey anybody can edit wikipedia...), the university that I attended to obtain my CS degree did in fact also differentiate between "System Programming" and "Systems programming" which also created confusion among us students back then, however the syllabi where indeed different and this would back up the previously mentioned sentiment, that there is a difference. On the other hand, I truly don't care at all as I realize that the absoluet majority of programmers clearly doesn't differentiate between system/systems programming, the few who do, will usually in fact have a corresponding background in system(s) programming, so that they might be trying to set themselves apart from other programmers describing their activities also as system/s programming.
Only because a word can be correctly used as a plural of another word, doesn't necessarily imply that it is indeed meant as the plural of that other word, there are numerous examples for this in the English language, too.
Apart from that, it really isn't all that helpful (or even particularly mature in the first place) to try to discredit a user's posting only because it may contain typos or even real mistakes.
Anyway, occassionally it really doesn't matter what's right or wrong, as the general public opinion has much more weight than anything else, and thus languages, being flexible and dynamic beasts, evolve while being coined by majorities.
