Does the software industry learn?

I wish the meme of "software engineering is young" would die. This profession is not younger than any other technical profession, in the modern sense. It was born out of prior practice and is still taught using the same techniques and philosophy. We are not special.

Furthermore, modern engineering is a mid to late 20th century practice - across all domains - not just ECE. We inherited some practices of the first industrial revolution, but by and large the techniques and tradition of education of engineers is consistent across the disciplines and evolved out of the post-WW2 marketplace for new technical products.

It would serve the author to remember this well coupled with the following :

Engineering is the discipline of systematic problem solving. Computer science is the mathematical study of abstraction. Software development is the practice of applying computer science to the domain of engineering.

This results in a force amplifier - much like a lever - but rather than creating torque what we're doing is amplifying the ability of creative problem solving to be applied and re-applied without re-engineering complexity. That abstraction and reuse propagates throughout entire industries in ways that are now invisible because they have become ubiquitous.

"Does the software industry learn?"

Well of course it does. We encode our learning of the problems we face everyday. The chips powering the computer I'm typing this on was designed with software that prototyped and ultimately yielded their design; packaged on circuit boards designed with software that automated hardware engineering checks to validate the design; encased in an enclosure designed with software that encompasses decades of 3D design and visualization technology; all fabricated using hardware and software tools with ambiguity resolved through digital communications that can be seen as a recursion of this paragraph.

It's turtles all the way down.

If you think we aren't learning everyday, propagating that learning, and preserving it for generations to come you do not understand the practices we undertake everyday. There is so much learned technique, practice, and theory encoded into the basis of our everyday lives it now seems so invisible you can blog about it.

It's almost like the issue is not that code is available, but how people use the code that's available, and no one seemingly likes funding open source code.

But maybe that's the part that this industry is incapable of learning.

I’m not sure how this meme got started but it’s toxic. Why does free software need funding? Free software needs contributions. Big corporations make contributions by paying engineers. Everyone benefits in this ecosystem.

Automotive engineers in 2022 are still creating new designs of water pumps and alternators. The new design meets some new requirements for the particular application, be they thermal, spatial or cost-related.

The date picker designed in 2022 is to be used with 2022 applications, IDEs, toolchains, etc.