> I 1,000% agree with this perspective. I also actually suspect that some form of professional licensing and/or personal liability would benefit the industry greatly, in that it would give more power to engineers to decline to build software irresponsibly due to pressure from management.
I also 1,000% agree with this. In fact, if there is any activism I do within the industry, it's pushing for this.
> Obviously this would be wildly complicated and there would be (potentially intolerable) downsides, but I do wonder what things would look like if we could revoke the licenses of people who repeatedly exercise poor judgment, or if responsible engineers knew they had the backing of a professional organization when pushing back against management.
I don't think there would be any downside other than expensive software. But studies have shown that poor software is more expensive!
The one thing that would complicate it is Open Source, but I think that hobbyists should be allowed to practice and put code up with no vetting, just like an engineer might design a shed for his backyard and post it on a blog without his/her seal of approval.
However, if some company decides to use that shed/Open Source code in a project, that company's certified engineers/programmers should be required to vet it the same as they would do for their own code.
And as for the gatekeeping of certification, I think uncertified programmers should be allowed to program, but under the supervision of a certified programmer who accepts liability for their work because that chief programmer should be checking their work.
> The irony isn't lost on me that elsewhere in this thread I said that nobody is coming after your software engineering license if you keep writing C :)
Maybe a litte irony, but I would probably be harsher on myself than you would think.
I think there would probably be a certification for writing C, one for writing Rust, etc.
So I would not be allowed to program as a certified engineer for Rust, but I could probably be certified in C, even though the certification and standard of care for C would be much harder and have a higher bar, for obvious reasons.
I don't know what the industry would set the standard of care for C at, but I personally wouldn't set it lower than my personal standards. If it was set at that, then my license should not be taken away, even if I were paid to work on `bc`.
But if it was set higher, say at the level given to libcurl or SQLite, then yes, I should lose my license if I were working for pay on `bc`, unless I stepped up.
In addition, if I worked on `bc` for pay, my failure to prevent memory bugs in `bcl` recently (the one where Valgrind was not hooked into its tests properly) should, at the very least, put me in front of a licensure board to explain myself. My recent failure to prevent the double-free on `SIGINT` when running expressions should also put me in front of a licensure board to explain myself.
If any paying user had been caused trouble for those bugs (no one ran into them as far as I know), I should have to compensate them for the trouble and probably lose my license for negligence. I was extremely upset that I let those slip through.
So no, I shouldn't lose my license for using C, but there should be one for C, and I should have at least come close to losing it for the recent mistakes that I would consider near-negligence.
> And I do realize that would probably be a disastrous idea in practice. But in my mind it's great.
I want to hear why it might be a disastrous idea. I can't see how it would be because it would lead to less but better quality software, and if bad software actually costs more in the long run, it would actually save the industry money! So I fail to see how it would be disastrous.
Please enlighten me on this; I have to know the weaknesses.
> And while I do agree that the industry grew too fast for its own good, this is unfortunately the reality we live in. The need for software has exceeded both our ability to produce it reliably and our capacity for training qualified engineers. So we have countless junior developers writing production code without good mentors.
Yes, this is the reality. This is why I don't dismiss Rust even though I hate it.
> And worse, I think we also have a terrifying number of "senior" engineers who are actually junior engineers with a lot of experience but trapped in a local maximum.
I really don't want you to be right, but I think you are, and that terrifies me because something bad is going to happen. I don't know how we fix this.
However, the end result of that bad thing might actually be certification and standard of care, which wouldn't be a bad thing.
As they say, regulations are written in blood, and I think that's the only way to fix this.
It's just too bad that people will have to die before that happens. I mean, I thought the Boeing 737 MAX would be the wake-up call, but it wasn't. Sigh...
> I "get" async/await but I… hate that it has to exist. I avoid it in all of my Rust projects. Partly because I don't want to use it, but also because I've never needed to solve a problem in a domain where it would have been invaluable. So just so you know, I've been writing Rust since right around 1.0 and I've been essentially able to just pretend it doesn't exist. I've never used it, but also I've never had to think about not using it if that makes sense.
That makes a lot of sense, and I don't blame you.
It's too bad we had a misunderstanding at the beginning of our conversations about this because I think we would agree more than disagree on the direction the industry would go. Oh well; we got to a point where we cleared up the misunderstanding.
Thank you.