[wizzwizz4]

> Imagine if guidelines from the 80s about how to write software were enshrined in law.

If Edsger W. Dijkstra's wild ravings from the 80s were enshrined in law, perhaps we wouldn't have quite so many fatalities attributable to crap software. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...

> A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot.".