| Most damning bit: This does not add up. Haven’t you noticed that we have taken over the world? No, software has exploded into previously untouched fertile ground--in another few decades, it'll be as boring and constrained as anything else, probably. Other engineering disciplines are right to mock and laugh and be somewhat terrified about software folks, because they can't engineer for shit. One of the biggest things that, say, the ASME does is to help standardize practices in its field. The mark of a mature engineering branch is that it has guidelines that are applicable to most use cases, and agreed-upon tools that work for most things. Software is nothing like this, for better or worse--we still haven't standardized on a set of programming languages, we still haven't standardized on a way of documenting and planning projects, we still haven't even settled on the most basic of issues of training. And you know what? We openly mock the people that have tried that--think about the criticisms of "architecture astronauts" and UML and XML and waterfall and testing and all the rest. We don't deserve to be called engineers...we're simply lucky enough that people are willing to pay such large sums for such hastily-built things. |