[jng]

Of course that's your take, definitely not mine. Not easy to discuss though: the obtuseness in today's software building won't be obvious until we discover the principles that turn it into engineering.

In ancient Egypt, pyramid-building must have seemed the unbelievable pinnacle of human achievement, only surpassable by ever higher and larger pyramids. Only now we see the primitiveness of those works (notwithstanding their merit and value).

It is my take that our current level of understanding of software building is similar to the that of architecture when pyramids were built.

Fortunately, advance is now much faster thanks to the many tools that help experimentation and communication, and we should be approaching somewhere reasonable in just a few decades.

[jimmaswell]

In what way does the work of Alan Turing etc. long ago not constitute a firm fundamental understanding of the field?

[jng]

In my view, Turing's results are equivalent in computer science (an important part of software creation) to Pythagoras' theorem in geometry (an important part of architecture): incredibly insightful, fundamental, everlasting and useful. Used directly or indirectly in all early works, respectively, in software and architecture. And only a tiny part of the foundational understanding necessary for really mastering the discipline, a level I think we still haven't reached in software.

[ibebrett]

They are more of an understanding of what theoretically can be computed, rather than anything to do with how to do it or how to efficiently do it. I study lots of theoretical computer science, but it doesn't intersect with software engineering much. Software engineering tends to more relate to project management, operations research etc.