[cemerick]

I agree that that's how things are now. My argument is that software development today is not an engineering discipline. You're right that I know almost nothing about "real" engineering. However, what I do know seems to suggest that commercial software development, even in the best of circumstances and with the best people, does not possess necessary characteristics that are relied upon in commercial engineering.

The thing is, so much of what software developers do could be systematized, or at least codified into what would often manifest as what we'd call "tools" that are then used to far more productive effect by those domain experts.

I've mentioned Matlab and Mathematica elsewhere as an example of delivering domain-specific notation, but they're also a great widespread example of delivering a domain-appropriate environment. What if these tools didn't exist, and any time someone needed to do some math, they had to cajole some programmers somewhere to help them get the job done? That'd be a disaster in relative terms, but that's the status quo of so many other "domains" where software development is regularly involved.