[Rooster61]

Programming and Software Engineering are two different things, and I'll challenge anyone that says otherwise.

Why? Because the ability to program is a subset of what a software engineer needs to be able to do. Granted, it's an IMPORTANT subset, but to create, or "engineer" good software on any truly useful scale, one needs other very, very important skills.

Engineering is based on the idea that you are using some degree of scientifically sound principle to create something in practice. That applies to creating software. There are clear, scientifically rigorous axioms, corollaries, etc that dictate ways that software can be written effectively, from the basic instructions a computer can process all the way up to the highest levels of abstraction. Software standards are developed that define ways that software should be written to take advantage of this scientific resource, and a huge part of writing effective and useful software is managing how one spends their time creating, refactoring, testing, and deploying/publishing that software. That is NOT an easy problem, and it is distinct from programming in and of itself.

The idea that a "board" has to exist to say whether or not something is an engineering practice doesn't hold water because it's the science underpinning the practice that makes it engineering.