[SirensOfTitan]

Google and Facebook, amongst others, have shown that the quick iteration strategy works, even for complex, critical systems. The key to success in that strategy is in good tooling--something that allows people to move quickly without breaking critical systems.

With that, understanding your goals is important in deriving strategy. Developing software for NASA space shuttles is going to be inevitably slower and more scrutinized than working on Google Music. Therein lies a traditional engineering problem of using the right tools for the job.

Software also does contribute to the public good in that an open-source mindset is built into the subcultures of the profession in general. It's pretty cool that I can get involved in programming using free tooling from day one, where my friends in finance or more traditional engineering careers cannot.

Overall, the author feels like they're arguing from some twisted version of the "golden age fallacy." In fact, this seems like the same type of tired arguments I hear stipulating that video-games are not art: built as an argument from the old guard to bully the new kid on the block.

[jeremysmyth]

Google and Facebook, amongst others, have shown that the quick iteration strategy works, even for complex, critical systems.

Complex systems, yes. Critical... well that depends on how you define critical.

The whole "quick iteration strategy" idea depends, largely, on the idea of "fail fast" or "move fast and break things". This necessarily makes iterative software development into an exploratory discipline, poking at something that doesn't work with a stick so that you understand it better and then creating something that does work off the back of that.

You simply cannot "move fast and break things" in a field where your created artifacts are expected to last a long time; we'd live in a fragile world of prototypes and conservatism were that the case.

In pretty much every other field populated by people who call themselves engineers, there's a whole lot more thought and maths going into the design of constructed artifacts, fed by a whole lot more science, before doing the actual construction. This approach is not just passé, but anathema in the software world. We just don't do engineering the way the rest of the world does.