[jlarocco]

> One of the downsides of programming being easily accessible and easy to get a job in is that there is no required standards body to write code. There's no way to fix this.

I guess that's what I was getting at. There never used to be a standards body for civil engineers, either, but after a while society got tired of bridges falling down and buildings collapsing. When will we get to that point with computer software?

It's kind of funny (or sad) that barbers and hair stylists need a license, but software engineers don't.

[squiggleblaz]

It isn't sufficient that people are upset about problems caused by people in a profession/trade. Instead a major source of regulation is the professionals/tradies themselves. "I spent five years at university, so they should too." "I'm a member of the Association of Software Professionals, so they should be too".

Since there's an unhealthy obsession with libertarian small government is software circles, it seems relatively unlikely this will happen any time soon. And we would rightly fear for our jobs if this happened, because I can't imagine the regulation applying to imported code.