My curriculum vitae asserts that I am a computational physicist. I have learned everthing else I know about computers and programming through reading and informal conversations with other programmers. But this seems to be the normal mode of operations in the computational physics community, judging from my observations at BYU, Caltech, and now Sandia. Like grantsmanship, scientific programming seems to be a vital career skill for the aspiring proto-scientist that is taught on the job rather than through formal coursework. Many of the reasons for this are still obscure to me.
Theorists elevate the observations of experimentalists into the Platonic ideal plane.
We are a lot like experimentalists, except that it's a make-believe world inside our computers that we are observing. This seems disreputable to experimentalists and theorists. I sometimes wonder if they have a point.