Editing Magnifica Humanitas: A Plain-Language Overview (section)

=== The programmer is a person before he is a producer ===

Perl Guilds begins from a view of the programmer as a '''craftsman''', not merely as a unit of technical output.

An apprentice is not less human than a master.

A programmer whose skills have temporarily fallen out of fashion is not obsolete.

A maintainer who spends days understanding an old system has not necessarily accomplished less than somebody who produces thousands of lines of new code.

A programmer supporting a family through ordinary consulting work may be doing something every bit as worthy as a programmer associated with a fashionable technological breakthrough.

This is closely aligned with the anthropology expressed in ''Magnifica Humanitas'': human dignity is not earned through productivity, technical capability, intelligence, market value, or social prestige.

That principle becomes particularly important in an age of artificial intelligence.

If a machine can generate code more quickly than a human being, it does not follow that the human programmer has become less valuable.

If automation reduces the amount of labor required for a task, the person whose labor was previously required does not thereby become a human surplus.

The Virtuous Programmer Initiative therefore resists defining a programmer primarily by output.

The programmer is a person who can judge, choose, promise, teach, serve, accept responsibility, develop virtue, enter relationships, and direct technical powers toward good or bad ends.

Those are not secondary properties surrounding the supposedly more important fact that he writes code.

They are central to what human craftsmanship is.