Software as A Pursuit
Is making software (for money – we'll leave hobby aside) a profession? Is it a craft? Is it a science? An engineering discipline? An art form? A social science?
It's easy to refute the idea of professional programmers. Professions are marked by an educational barrier to entry: you can't be a self-taught lawyer or architect, for example. The education ensures that (prospective) practitioners are aware of the institutional body of knowledge and code of ethics – things that are absent from the "profession" of programming. Certain organizations, such as the Chartered Institute for IT—http://www.bcs.org/ and the Association for Computing Machinery—http://www.acm.org are trying to cast it as such but represent a minority of practitioners.
We have professional-style conferences; these cater to a small minority of practitioners, frequently featuring sales rhetoric and self-promotion alongside (or instead of) problem-solving...