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…
Well, yes, but after the 75 years, don't you think that "too young" argument is getting old? Nuclear energy, medical imaging, and the space part of aerospace are all younger than "software development". These are all mature industries highly codified, and they also all also encompass software development among other things. Could it be that software development isn't an engineering discipline at all but a supporting…
I think this is a very good point!
If you are writing the control software for a rocketship's avionics, you probably need to have some understanding of aeronautics, control theory, signal processing etc. Ultimately the act of writing the software is merely an expression of all the math and theory that you have spent a lifetime acquiring.
Inversely, the engineer who is speccing out the control software for a nuclear reactor is essentially writing the software for it. It's just in human readable format such that the human journeyman who's actually slinging the code can implement it. By the time the code is being written, the engineering work has been done already.
Programming is much closer to bricklaying or assembling or machining. Software engineering is much closer to architecture design, and does not involve a lot of code writing.