Indeed, I object to the loose use of "professional", and I don't know why I used "civil engineer" otehr than that's who I think of when I talk about this because I talk about building bridges. I want to distinguish that from "software engineer", which is not a proper term in a lot of places no matter what people put on their business cards.

We don't have to pretend that we know what the OP meant: I addressed that in the rest of the post as I talked about Computer Science degrees and formal training. I wrote a lot more than just the first paragraph. :)

Also, I don't say that programmers should not need to be licensed. I only point out that they currently don't. That's a different discussion, and don't mistake that to mean I implied anything other than the current state of affairs.