Programmers should not call themselves engineers (2015)

The original linked article was written by someone who's never engineered anything and clearly has no social or cultural connection with any engineers, but I can see in one line that you and I are at least partially on the same page about what engineering is, which is not much of an endorsement for the article.

The critical difference between science, engineering, and art/craft is engineering involves highly predictable well trodden ground where simulation always corresponds to measured reality. The predictive process is complicated and takes a long time and a lot of effort to learn and ingrain. The aesthetics and tradition don't matter as much (or at all) compared to the predictable performance and predictable cost. That's engineering.

The difference between a science and engineering is an engineers output is optimized to minimal cost yet fits a predictable yet variable safety envelope. That column will not buckle with 99.999% odds over the lifetime of the building if built to commercial standards and my specs. Science is much less predictable and its criteria for prediction is much lower and generally not "safety of life" related and tends to be extremely abstract. Is that theoretical cosmological model interesting and not provably invalid? OK publish. Does that biomedical pharma experiment have more than 2 sigma of abstract statistical significance or whatever the statistical flavor is for pharma research today? OK publish. Science can of course eventually turn into engineering... A lot of chemeng make a lot of money turning lab bench scale processes into factory scale processes, they are engineers because they understand and predict scalability, unlike computer scientists who famously do not.

The difference between craft/art and engineering is again safety of life and predictability but in craft/art you don't care about optimizing cost and safety as primary criteria. Does that custom bookcase have nice proportions? Is the wood grain clear? Is the stain too dark or too light or just right? Sometimes craftsmen such as framing carpenters need help from an engineer for a wide beam or similar weirdness but most of craft/art boils down to "grandpa put wall studs on 16 inch centers so I will too". Building codes for the building trades are written in human blood, not calculus math, for example. Somebody got electrocuted doing that, gets a line in the NEC or building code, we'd rather figure out the size of that weird beam using math rather than seeing if it collapses is structural engineering.

Very few people write code in an engineering fashion where the entire process is predictable and heavily testable against reality and human lives depend upon it. Some embedded stuff like PID controllers in factories or anti-lock brakes are like that. Your average web framework CRUD app, not so much, who knows what it'll do, and when it fails thousands will not die in the crash/collapse.

I even have the option to have a license at which point I could call myself a profesionnal engineer. This is the same in other Canadian provinces but the engineering license is regulated at the provincial level so there are a few diffenrences.

I think you're right. Regulation stifles innovation.

Even in a narrow sense, thinking software alone, everyone knows the saying "Standard library is where modules go to die", meaning that there are stricter requirements to make it to the standard library in the first place and stricter still to update them once they've made it in.