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Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?

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Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?

#91

Post by pwndByDeath »

imglorp wrote: post #16

This 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…

Software is the one discipline we can have perfection. In every other engineering there are tolerances, unknowns we have to yield to nature. In software we are god. We're just a lazy and stupid god.

Anecdotal, I had a coworker working on a new feature in a huge code base. I was trying to ignore the pseudocode planning they put on the board. After a moment of frustration I wrote down 6 conditionals that simplified what would become hundreds of new lines, to those 6 statement, and capture a few more corner cases they had not worked out yet.

Months later I got a green light on a total overhaul of the larger code base and we turned a massive code base into a fully automated and effectively bullet proof distributed system because I took the time to apply engineering principles to.the problem. The code wasn't always the most proper (I did things downright sinful) but the system was organized like an engineering project with interdependent subsystem instead of a rube Goldberg kludge of new.function on old. That overhaul too less time than any of the prior incremental feature updates prior.

Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?

#92

Post by NaomiLehman »

apalmer wrote: post #12

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…

software is more like writing books than engineering

Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?

#93

Post by mamcx »

hatsuseno wrote: post #10

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…

The problem is the deps: You can have Rust with no nulls, but the OS was made by it. You can have a RDBMS with ACID, but the file system is liar.

Then, you can make a product that was applied engineering, but you can't replace all the others that not.

Civil engineering and friends have the advantage that is built on top of the universe, that despite claims to the contrary, was not hacked with perl!

Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?

#95

Post by gchamonlive »

cachius wrote: post #86
gchamonlive wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's solving and building, but most of all it's language. It's all language. Either telling the machine what to do or coordinating a group of people cohesively.

You mean communication, the transfer of ideas. Already hard between humans, machine language and operation is completely foreign.

No, I mean language. Even if you are alone with yourself in a solo project, you need language to structure your ideas. Communication is when you need to transfer these structures in place (you and a team) and/or in time (you and yourself in different points in time). But it's first and foremost a problem of language, of giving structure to reality.

Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?

#96

Post by BoxOfRain »

Devasta wrote: post #28

Real engineers can face personal liability and even jail time for negligence. How much of modern software practices would exist today if the senior engineer needed to sign off on a project?

> Real engineers can face personal liability and even jail time for negligence.

To be fair, software engineers can face similar liabilities in highly-regulated fields. When you're dealing with software regulated as a medical device for example, senior engineers do sign off on releases. You also see more processes associated with engineering carried out, particularly with respect to testing and documentation.

Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?

#97

Post by gchamonlive »

ratelimitsteve wrote: post #64
gchamonlive wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's solving and building, but most of all it's language. It's all language. Either telling the machine what to do or coordinating a group of people cohesively.

I actually read an interesting study, probably here, about software engineers. It turns out that for as much emphasis as we put on mathematics we actually tend to be better at language, and that even our penchant for maths is less in the way of calculation and more in the way of definition and expression (which is to say, making it the language numbers speak and learning it that way).

This one perhaps?

https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/03/02/not-a-math-person...

Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?

#98

Post by empath75 »

apalmer wrote: post #12

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…

Government did not invent the discipline of engineering. This is just completely backwards. How do you think all of those engineering organizations came up with those manuals and regulations, were they not doing any engineering until they published a manual? Complete nonsense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ivqWN4L3zU

Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?

#99

Post by beAbU »

kykat wrote: post #8

I 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…

I think there is space for both.

You have your "not an engineer" people who have built airplanes, cars, motorcycles and whatnot. They are good with their tools and they are able to make amazing things. Some of them might even be doing these things for a living.

Then you get your "real" engineers who need to measure and test and spec out and define limits and must be able to provably demonstrate that the bridge will not fall over.

In software you have your journeymen who build software for a living, they are good at what they do and they are building amazing things, and then you have your "engineers" who are building avionics for rockets and planes, the control software for nuclear reactors and so on. They need to prove their software works as intended and cannot venture beyond it's parameters etc.

Two very different professions, two very different types of people, yet both are (on the surface) doing something that appears very similar.

Re: Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?

#100

Post by estimator7292 »

apalmer wrote: post #12

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…

Who makes the software that "real" engineers use to design bridges? Can developers of such software afford to be any less rigorous than the "real" engineers?
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