Two different roles of the software programmer, according to Simonyi.

Charles Simony, the famous Hungarian-American programmer who oversaw the creation of Microsoft Office, distinguished between two separate roles of software design:

In Simonyi's view, one source of the trouble is that we expect programmers to do too much. We ask them to be experts at extracting knowledge from nonprogrammers in order to figure out what to build; then we demand that they be experts at communicating those wishes to the computer. "There are two meanings to software design," he says. "One is designing the artifact we're trying to implement. The other is the sheer software engineering to make that artifact come into being. I believe these are two separate roles -the subject matter expert and the software engineer."

(Rosenberg: pp. 278-279)

I imagine he is referring to the same sort of separation of roles we see between the architect (or the engineer) and those who lay the bricks and finally shapes the original plans in real life. If that's what he is referring to, it definitely is a true distinction. On the one hand, you have the programmer as a designer, the professional who makes the long-term decisions about the overall design of the application, the language to be used, the resources thay will be needed, etc. Then, on the other hand, you have the programmer as coder, the one who actually writes the code and implements the plans laid out by the designer. We're definitely talking about two separate roles, two different phases of the software development. However, what's not so clear to me is that they need to be done by different people too. Perhaps that should be the case, ideally. However, programming has not reached the level of reliability and abstraction that's so prevalent in other fields, such as the construction business, for instance. It's not so clear to me that we can safely divide software development teams in groups of designers and coders, the latter just implementing whatever the former lay out on paper. There is a good amount of wishful thinking in that idea, I'm afraid. As a matter of fact, it could very well be that you could end up with a worst case scenario: software designers who have little experience in the nitty-gritty business of actual programming (this is not, obviously, Charles Simonyi's case) putting together their pie-in-the-sky schemes, while programmers who have never been asked to take a bird's view of their projects continue working on spiritless line of code after line of code without having a clue how the whole thing fits together. I seriously doubt this would represent a step forward for the world of software development as we know it.