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Software "Engineering" is not really an Engineering discipline, such as Civil Engineering, where there are norms, standards, accepted practices, regulations, and a body of knowledge that hasn't changed much in hundreds of years. Or compare it to Mechanical Engineering, which is similar. In comparison, Software is a very young field, and is not regulated at all. Open any EULA and you will see that you are indemnifying the vendor from any sort of liability to the maximum extent possible. Further, software is only loosely limited by physics: almost anything that you can imagine can be built using software, so software creations are incredibly complex, and are all man-made, with extensive combinatorial inputs that simply can't be tested or are not feasible to test economically. Also consider that fact that software is almost always purpose-built and not comparable to a mass-produced artifact such as an IC engine, or a girder, or a length of rebar, or a chemical reagent. So the methods of Industrial Engineering, which concern themselves with quality control in the face of uncertainty do not neatly apply to the software world. The rate of change of software artifacts is just mind-boggling: once a bolt is produced, that's it. It doesn't need to be continuously maintained, updated, or improved, because it simply doesn't possess the malleability of code. If you fasten it with the right amount of torque, you are probably good for an indefinite length of time and can expect to simply forget about it. The software equivalents of nuts and bolts, such as compilers, are nowhere near as simple as nuts and bolts: they are whole universes in their own right, and every detail of that universe is man-made, conceptualized from scratch. I could go on, but given that software is so complex, it is to be expected that it doesn't hold up to your notions of quality. If you want to look at large codebases that have maintained a high quality, the obvious recommendation is the Linux Kernel. Another is the Go Standard Library, which is very readable and well-written. I think musl, a minimal libc replacement, is also considered very well-written (but perhaps it's not a huge codebase). Postgres source is also widely known to be pretty good for such a complex codebase that is worked on by a large group. |