"Software Engineering" Is Not Engineering (2005)

From knowing many different types of engineers, not only does software engineering fall pretty neatly within that group of jobs but also software is an integral part of their engineering practices. I know some people who are designing planes and if software isn't an engineering discipline I guess I need to tell them they recently became not engineers (though maybe because they occasionally use physics equations the author would say they still are. It's a silly distinction). The argument seems mostly based on their personal definition of engineering, which doesn't seem useful to me (a quick reading of a dictionary would make it seem that software engineering false very neatly within definition 2b https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engineering)

Overall though I found this post incredibly hard to read. It's incredibly long and wordy though that's par for the course for these petty semantic arguments.

Right! I think a lot of people, who have not done a lot of "things you can kick" engineering, have a very romantic view of it. Especially the relationship with whoever is nominally setting the goals of the project.

The physics works perfectly, of course. But physics is only a third of the constraint in engineering. The other two thirds are project goals and convention.

Project goals are horribly underspecified, every time. It's incredibly rare to be given a project that is completely constrained on that side, and if you do get one, most of the time it's physically impossible to achieve. This is because the people who write those specifications not doing engineering, they're doing marketing or sales or just had a cool idea. Sometimes that can even be the engineer themselves :-) So it's up to the engineer to fill in the gap, and they do it with experience and a sense of aesthetics, of sorts.

Convention is what constrains the physical possibilities of engineering to the practical. Yes, you can build anything and make it work, possibly even better than what everyone else builds. But you will have to invent and construct a lot of new technologies before you can build your perfect mousetrap. So, you settle on standard components and build a decent one instead. But this introduces a gap between physics and engineering, too. A bit of no-man's land that you can reach into to produce truly great results. But it's up to the engineer to know when it's worth it.

If someone told me I couldn't call myself an engineer and instead I had to call myself a software developer, I'd turn around and tell them I just forgot all my theoretical computer science, and of course we can do a bubble sort on the multi-terabyte database, LOL.

The article is "not even wrong". Most of the argument just circles around an inconsistent definition of what "real world" means.

> Remember "imaginary numbers" from algebra? You could do funky stuff with them like take the square root of negative nine. Imaginary numbers are generally useless for the physical world that we experience. However, they turned out to be very useful in the field of electronics. More specifically, they had predictive power in the field of electronics. Using imaginary number math, one can predict behavior of electrons and the accuracy of such predictions in models can be measured.

Like here, I struggle to understand what the point is. Is predicting the behavior of electronics "useless for the physical world we experience"? And that's ignoring the author's apparent ignorance of all the other ways in which complex numbers are useful in the physical world besides taking negative numbers' square roots.