41–50 of 186 posts
Most 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…
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods
I'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.
If you ever want to see how they think, just check out the myriad UFO subreddits. It's pretty wild. Everything is aliens and a government cover up to those folks....even when you prove it's a floating trash bag they think you're a fool. There are a few rational commenters, but a lot of people that want to believe so bad they fall for all these grifters selling pseudoscience books and seminars.
That's a pretty annoying sampling bias and doesn't reflect the community as a whole. There's plenty of rational voices that think most things are just balloons and drones, but they don't comment when it's boring and mundane. In those cases, only schizo voices remain.
How 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?). T…
This 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…
I think even that is highly romanticised by people. Take Boeing's two big blunders in recent years. The Max and Starliner both had terrible terrible software practices that were "by the book". The problem is "the book" really changed a lot, and the behemoths haven't kept up.
It used to be that "the NASA way" was the most reliable way to build software, and there are still articles and blog posts shared here about the magical programming "rules", but frankly they've been left behind by the industry. On the Starliner project Boeing was seen as the "stable, reliable, tried and true" partner, while Dragon was seen as the "risky" one. Yet Boeing doing everything by the book had 2 loss of crew problems in their first uncrewed demo flight, one relating to software timers, and their crewed demo flight was plagued by problems root-caused to a lack of integration testing. Again, everything by the book, and they failed multiple times on the happy path! The book has to be rewritten, taking into account what the software industry (tech) has "learned" in the past decades. Just think about man-hours and amounts of billions that went into tech software engineering and you can see that obviously NASA can't keep up.
This 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…
I think we've reached the point where this is no longer true - self driving cars, supposed robots you can take home, LLMs being unleashed to randomly guess at medical data or write software to do verification or sensitive tasks.
I think software engineering is definitely engineering, we've just been successful in lobbying against proper regulation. But all that is changing, the EU is introducing the Cyber Resilience Act and I think we need a lot more of that.
Most 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.
Most 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…
Technically, we're a mature discipline. The author laments our lack of tools as advanced as architectural CAD systems, but I'm unconvinced. We have static types, tests, linters, version control, benchmarks, standard data formats and protocols, deployment orchestration, debuggers. It's pretty nice.
Socially, our discipline feels immature. As mentioned, we don't know how well TDD works, how best to write documentation, or how to pick a flavor of agile. But these are meta-problems that plague every discipline! I challenge you to find a high quality study comparing imperial vs metric units in architecture, or the ideal number of architects for a given project size.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.