[Mikhail_Edoshin]

Well, a hand watch or a chair cannot kill people, but the manufacturing documentation for them will be very precise.

Software development is not engineering because it is still relatively young and immature field. There is a joke where a mathematician, a physicist and a engineer are given a little red rubber ball and asked to find its volume. The mathematician measures the diameter and computes, the physicist immerses the ball into water and sees how much was displaced, and an the engineer looks it up in his "Little red rubber balls" reference.

Software development does not yet have anything that may even potentially grow into such a reference. If we decide to write it we would not even know where to start. We have mathematicians who write computer science papers; or physicists who test programs; standup comedians, philosophers, everyone. But not engineers.

[ozim]

Difference is that code is the documentation and design.

That is problem where people don’t understand that point.

Runtime and running application is the chair. Code is design how to make “chair” run on computer.

I say in software development we are years ahead when it comes to handling complexity of documentation with GIT and CI/CD practices, code reviews and QA coverage with unit testing of the designs and general testing.

So I do not agree that software development is immature field. There are immature projects and companies cut corners much more than on physical products because it is much easier to fix software later.

But in terms of practices we are way ahead.

[dambi0]

Isn’t this similar to saying the valves and vessels of a chemical processing system is the design and documentation of the overall process?

I know that it’s frequently reposted but Peter Naur’s Programming as Theory Building is always worth a reread.

The code doesn’t tell us why decisions were made, what constraints were considered or what things were ruled out