Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
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Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
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Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#2It's craft. But what about the math, you say. All kinds of craft demand understanding of the related math.
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#3Many governments do not recognize software development as an engineering discipline, and do not treat it (i.e. licensing, regulation) as such.
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#4The binary was always a kind of hallucination from real events. It's a toy model that uniquely (and mostly poorly) fits in our reality as simula. This article demonstrates Baudrillard was more accurate than The Matrix, ie the simula becomes seamless and transparent in our reality. It's not separate.
Software is neither engineering nor science, so the terms Software Engineering and Computer Science are mislabels at best and extinction propaganda at worst.
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#5It's craft. But what about the math, you say. All kinds of craft demand understanding of the related math.
The math serves the outcomes, not the other way around.
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#6What I believe makes the distinction between engineer and non-engineer in the software world so difficult to pin down is that software is so powerful that most non-engineers can end up easily doing engineer-level work.
For example, a mechanical engineer is someone that designs mechanical systems. In order to do that, they will need specialized and very expensive equipment, and the end result will be produced with machines costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Designing a system and producing a single one-off artifact are two very different things, and that's why a lone craftsman in their shed cannot do actual engineering (outside of pen and paper mockups).
With software, otoh, it takes nothing to go from default nginx for serving your static personal website to an orchestrated cluster of containers and load balancers. The problem is that, for the latter, if you haven't got an engineer-like training, you will not be able to reason about the system, because you didn't really design it.
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#7Most of software isn't engineering, it's just building.
It's like a lot of these custom car/motorcycle builders vs actual engineers designing for a major manufacturer. You are both building a product but one places a lot more rigor on the science, data, and testing behind the decisions. That doesn’t mean the custom builders don't build good stuff, just that you won't get answers to things like how much force a particular part can take or how much energy it will absorb in a crash.
In software, you might have some people still doing real software engineering, but they are in sectors that take documentation and testing more seriously. Not that every player takes this dedicated approach, but potentially parts of auto, aviation and defense fall into this.
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#8I always thought of myself as someone closer to a craftsman than an engineer, it's true that there's more "I think", "I believe" than verified working processes, their limits, etc.
But I also think that the software development process is maybe too flexible to be regulated, and tested like the other disciplines, a building is always a building, a material is always the same material.
But in software, who is going to test and verify the "materials" if they change constantly and evolve? It seems to me that any attempt at standardizing software development could slow down development so much that most won't find it to be worth it.
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#9This isn't an uncommon lament, despite what the author thinks.
The problem is that running "studies" on what the author and others are asking for is effectively impossible. You can't get 25 teams of suitably-random professionals to build a non-trivial program one way, and 25 to build it another, and then do statistically-significant analysis of them, because that would be a staggeringly expensive study... and that is just for one such study, which would then be, you know, wrong, incorrectly analyzed, controversial, biased, etc. The expense of getting a representative set of such studies, independently conducted, enough to actually settle a question, beggars the imagination.
Even such studies as have been performed are almost all invalidated by virtue of being run on inexperienced students. I'm not really that interested in whether inexperienced students do or do not do well with some methodology for the most part. What happens with professionals?
In the meantime, all we've got is experiences. Contrary to popular belief, science does not mandate that we therefore curl up into a ball and cry ourselves to sleep at night. We just have to do our best. Berating other people for not pouring billions of dollars into the simplest of studies won't help much. They're still not going to, and you still have to go to work, sit down, and figure out how you're going to accomplish some task, even it you don't have double-blinded meta-analyses from decades of studies to pull from.
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#10How many centuries did it take for civil engineering, for example, to become the codified, standardized, and respected calling it is now? While I'm sure "software development" will leapfrog that span of time, but it's only been 75 years since the discipline was invented to begin with (Lovelace's work was more applied math than anything else, but the starting point is arguably between then and, let's say, FORTRAN?).
That is to say, as a programmer, I feel like we're wading in an ocean of unknown size and depth. As we learn, by trial and error, the confines of that space will fuel the standardization and codification of the craft will only increase as a function of time until it isn't craft, but applied science.
Edit: s/applied science/engineering/