Chef André Soltner recently imparted upon a group of students graduating from culinary school, “We are not artists. We are craftspeople.” Artists make something entirely new every day, while craftspeople take pride in performing generally the same work from day to day, honing their skills, making little improvements, and experimenting on the side. It’s a good reality check to today’s culture of celebrity chefs, the dreams of many and the fate of few.

We’re still waiting for any programmer to become a household name. The social status of our profession is somewhere between busboy and dishwasher for the larger public, assumed to be boring, unintellectual (yes they think that), and generally meaningless. The frustration that regular people feel when wrestling with a Microsoft Word document that has collected some particularly nasty invisible formatting codes—this must be what programming is like.

Funnily enough, the worst days are something like that. Debugging can become a day-long session of trial and error, and when you finally win (as you must) it’s hard to celebrate the hours spent resulting in a single line changed. But then it’s not usually like that, or we wouldn’t be here; in fact, we work every day to make our environments (languages, libraries, editors, runtimes) more predictable, just as a good cook organizes his station and sharpens his knives constantly. Predictability and productivity are the reasons programmers pick technologies and fight like dogs over them; knowing and using a better technology (better for one’s own mindset) means less time fumbling in the dark and more time making interesting things.

That is, if one is permitted to make interesting things at all. Extending the professional kitchen analogy, there are plenty of ‘restaurant’ kitchens these days where craftsmanship can hardly be hoped for—and forget about art. Every dish has been focus grouped from here to Omaha, in a feedback loop whose only inputs are cheese and sugar. It can’t be very inspiring to work on a line that is just an assembly line for meals conceived, prepared, and flash-frozen far away—and the result is not so great for the customers’ health.

Just as a culinary education would be mocked by a job assembling unhealthy prepared dishes, so is computer science by the neverending attempts to turn it into factory work. Even more so than cuisine—whose finer points are certainly lost on the modern public but which at least involves visible and edible matter—programming is a mysterious craft. It’s also expensive. Factoring in its low social status, it’s a wonder programmers haven’t been rounded up to work on custom shopping carts, wordpress installations, and reporting tools in firewalled camps where eyes can be better kept upon us. The next best thing is what’s commonly done, accounting for every hour of programming work and being sure that all software ‘ideas’ originate and are prioritized by those safely insulated from any understanding of how software is written and implemented.

But maybe it is time to start fixing this dysfunction from the bottom up. After all, computing has never been more central to culture and life. Technology has never been more fashionable. It’s absurd that software-dependents continue to assume that most coders (certainly they ones they may encounter, or work with) are some species of keyboard-hunching mole, while the few responsible for the web sites they love are millionaire 20 years-olds. Choose your demeaning stereotype!

As we know, it just isn’t like that. Most of us do work with passion to produce things of value and of beauty, that will please their users and last for years to come. The many little decisions that make up our days affect software products much more than the back scratching, eye clawing theatre of the conference room. And we know software better than anyone that doesn’t write it: what is possible now, what will be possible soon, and what really needs to happen for the next breakthrough. This passion for the how of computing, nerdy as it sounds, isn’t any more pathetic than tweeting a photo from an iPhone is pathetic. Computing what humans do these days, and we make it possible.

So many of us are working to produce amazing things in different disciplines. There are people slaving away in restaurant kitchens to become master chefs, and there are programmers working to become master builders of software. We’re part of a generational movement to revalue production, from handmade goods to motorcycle repair. This labor is respectable. The work that should be held in question, if anything, is that which has no intrinsic value.

What we in the productive, and sometimes creative, class must do is look out for each other. Us. People that make things, across disciplines. As software writers we should consider the products and services we purchase: are they meaningful, does a human share in the work and profit of their production? Is a news publication insightful, does it come alive with an editorial voice or is it claptrap manufactured for easy demographic targets? Do we respect productive labor that we don’t fully understand? All of these lines can draw programming out of its longtime cultural swamp, as we align with our counterparts in other professions and they recognize the humanity of our work.

In some mutually understanding future, it might even become normal to have master software builders in charge of building software, the same as a head chef decides the menu at any restaurant worth visiting.

But please: do not call yourself a software artist. At least, not until The Code Network goes on the air in 2012.