In traditional Japanese society, there are 4 classes of people: samurai; farmers; artisans; and merchants; in that order of importance or rank. Actually there is a fifth class - the untouchables who are also unmentionable. This group includes shoemakers and leather tanners who are not classed as artisans. The Japanese are very particular about anything to do with feet. Feet after all walk the dirty ground and the shoes covering them are therefore unclean.

[A brief tribal aside: one of Ray Immelman's 22 tribal attributes is that a strong tribe knows how it compares to the untouchables. To make the unified Japanese tribe of Tokugawa Shogunate strong, it was therefore necessary to have an untouchable class in society.]

I've been wondering how the Japanese view software engineers. Are they samurai or artisans? Technically, any knowledge worker makes the samurai grade. Software engineers have a university degree. They are educated. They are part of a profession. All professional occupations are samurai jobs. By the 19th Century, Japan was so peaceful and civilized that the samurai were no longer needed as warriors. The modern samurai of his day was a doctor or other professional. Meanwhile, in todsay's world, those ceremonial swords - the short and the long - would both come in handy for hacking up source code and refactoring it ;-) However, the reality of much software development and a key argument from some of the agile community has been that software development is a craft. That would put it clearly in the artisan category.

So, if the Von Neumann architecture had been around in the 1840's before the American forced regime change in Japan, would the Shogun have viewed the programmers as members of the samurai? Would they have been rich, well dressed, middle class land owners with servants, horses and vacation homes in the country, licensed to carry swords in public, and revered by ordinary members of society as their betters? It's interesting to compare which of these attributes apply today and which don't - "So, you work at Microsoft. Tell me, what is it about software engineering that has got anything to do with being a professional engineer?", a Boeing employee.