One big caveat to this is formal methods. If we did formal methods for all production code, it would meet the highest definition for rigor and rest safely as a true engineering discipline.
Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
31–40 of 186 posts
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#32Most 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 partic…
If I understand your analogy correctly, what science in involved directly in software dev other than used directly in already existing models like medicine? (and even this isn't exactly science, as medicine is practice, not analytic discourse). Engineering relies on science, particularly building, vehicles, etc.
I'm thinking things like: do you know what's the latency and throughput of your system, and how it is affected by different conditions? Based on this, people who work on real-time systems (including video games) would be the closest thing to the engineers of the software world.
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#33Most 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 partic…
> Most of software isn't engineering, it's just building.
Other way around. The difference between engineering and building is that building refers to the building of a component in isolation, while engineering is about the building an entire system through the combination of multiple components. Most software — and all software that is actually used — is a built system.
> but one places a lot more rigor on the science
That'd be "professional engineering"; sometimes referred to as PE for short. We're talking about engineering (sans professional) here.
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#34I've always wondered why UFOs are only a USA phenomenon. Why doesn't China have these extraterrestrial biological remains? What about Russia? North Korea? Japan? Because it's a form of mass-hysteria. Just like the flat Earth crowd, they will continue to shovel the narrative and ignore scientific evidence.
Mind you, I'm saying this as a hard skeptic only because this is a persistent but weak counterargument, and thus not very useful.
The "alien mummies" and "Buga sphere" came from South America, for instance. You can find UFO and alien contact reports from all over. Brazil has the Varginha incident, the Ariel School incident in Zimbabwe, the Voronezh UFO incident in Russia, Japan Airlines Flight 1628, to name a few examples. The UFO phenomenon isn't at all limited to the US.
Although to be fair, all of that's probably the result of American pop cultural influence.
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#35This is closely related to why Sussman and Abelson stopped teaching SICP: it is not possible to engineer software any more because systems are too complicated to completely understand and abstractions hide too many behaviors. So now we do "programming by poking" to understand what the system does instead of making it correct by construction. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5335 We just tinker. That's all we can d…
There have been serious efforts at software engineering, like the OOP movement in the 1980s and 90s to construct software very methodically. Programmers hate it and rejected it. To be fair, it does tend to create its own pathology. Instead of a layer cake made of congealed spaghetti, you tend to get over -engineering. https://github.com/Hello-World-EE/Java-Hello-World-Enterpris... Software engineering leads to softwa…
Look at ECS and game dev. Some may say games are just products, yet some real engineering is done in some places.
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#36This is closely related to why Sussman and Abelson stopped teaching SICP: it is not possible to engineer software any more because systems are too complicated to completely understand and abstractions hide too many behaviors. So now we do "programming by poking" to understand what the system does instead of making it correct by construction. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5335 We just tinker. That's all we can d…
There have been serious efforts at software engineering, like the OOP movement in the 1980s and 90s to construct software very methodically. Programmers hate it and rejected it. To be fair, it does tend to create its own pathology. Instead of a layer cake made of congealed spaghetti, you tend to get over -engineering. https://github.com/Hello-World-EE/Java-Hello-World-Enterpris... Software engineering leads to softwa…
> I have this weird hypothesis that part of why methodical "correct" software engineering fails is that it succeeds. It is able to manage complexity, which allows complexity to grow without bound.
Interesting thought that. Makes a lot of sense. Will remember it the next time I randomly have a train of thought about software complexity on the bus... Am I normal? does everyone here do that? Of course outside hackernews this is a hopeless question.
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#37This again? In general, Software Engineering is not engineering. It's not a technical issue, it's a 'software doesn't really kill people so government doesn't intervene in it'. In the case where the software is life and death it's generally developed in ways similar to 'real' engineering Fundamentally folks built building/structures without engineering, just so consistently caused death and destruction that govt step…
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Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#38I've always wondered why UFOs are only a USA phenomenon. Why doesn't China have these extraterrestrial biological remains? What about Russia? North Korea? Japan? Because it's a form of mass-hysteria. Just like the flat Earth crowd, they will continue to shovel the narrative and ignore scientific evidence.
>I've always wondered why UFOs are only a USA phenomenon
It plain isn't and to claim that it is shows that you have done EXACTLY 0 research into the topic. This kind of bad faith engagement shows an utter lack of curiosity.
UFOs are huge in South America within just seconds you can find hundreds of sightings and discussions about them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varginha_UFO_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_sightings_in_Brazil
https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-went-alien-hunting-on-chil...
Ufos are also a thing above Europe with the Belgian Ufo wave and the Rendlesham Forest incident being well known and seminal cases in UFO Lore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave
Africa also had for example the ariel school incident in Zimbabwe, one of the most well known UFO cases ever
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_School_UFO_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_sightings_in_Africa
Same goes for russia where after the cold war ufo sightings were discussed in offically declassified documents:
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005517761.pdf
Must I go on or is that enough to accept that "UNKNOWN THING IN SKY DOES WEIRD THING I DON'T UNDERSTAND" is pretty much a global phenomenon that can and should be scientifically investigated just the same as we would investigate everything else we find anomalous?
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#39Most 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 partic…
Then you get paradoxes like why the rigor doesn't work in practice. These expensive CS books mathematically prove a map has faster access than a vector because it uses a binary tree. Yet the vector works faster because the CPU pipelines sequential operations very efficiently.
Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
#40I 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…
A material is not always the same material, that's a non-trivial part of what engineering is about managing. Building to code is downstream of engineering, and that's more or less when you can get away with “SPF is SPF”, because the building code is already accounting for the differences in the safety margins and allowed/required techniques, vs the non-trivial difference between spruce, fir and pine.
If you want to do anything outside of what's permitted by the book, that's generally when you call an engineer.
It does seem to me that a lot of calls for formalizing things in software is trying to skip over the engineering step and jump straight to a codebook that crystalizes the common engineered solutions into a list of dos and don'ts.