May 15, 2003

toolsmith

n.

The software equivalent of a tool-and-die specialist; one who specializes in making the tools with which other programmers create applications. Many hackers consider this more fun than applications per se; to understand why, see uninteresting. Jon Bentley, in the Bumper-Sticker Computer Science chapter of his book More Programming Pearls, quotes Dick Sites from DEC as saying I'd rather write programs to write programs than write programs.

Posted by Jargon File at May 15, 2003 10:26 AM

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