The conference is called “Software Craftsmanship”, the conference site landing page has a picture of a luthier working on a violin, during the work of the programme committee we were invited by you to classify submissions as suitable for “apprentice”, “journeyman” or “master” attendees.

These are all very powerful borrowings from the source domain. Having presented the metaphor “programming is a guild-style craft” you can’t really complain if folks run with that. If you don’t like where than leads, then maybe it’s a sign that the metaphor is not a good one (for your purposes).

I wanted to quickly add my own thoughts on “software craftsmanship”. I think maybe people like John and Keith might be reading too much into the intent of the conference. there seems to be some unspoken assumption that we’re going to attempt to define a standard set of skills and knowledge (or achievements) that someone must attain to call themselves a “software craftsman”. In actual fact, if you delve into most disciplines – no matter how seemingly innocuous – they can turn out to be huge and mutli-disciplinary.

Jason