| Thanks Ed. I was about to reply that I specifically did *not* talk about software and that it’s a fair criticism that software is seldom engineered.
That reminds me of the old Bill Gates swipe at the auto industry and GM’s reply - see http://www.wussu.com/humour/gm.htm
Cheers, David
UK +44 7788 561308
US +1 336 283 0606
David, Yeah. In many engineering trades, about every 10 years we make a variant of an old design that uses the latest physical technology, and describe it exactly that way, so that engineers trust the design based on successful implementations with earlier technologies. In software engineering, however, we create a new set of terms and pretend that it is a brand new idea (possibly out of utter ignorance of all preceding engineering experience), and then we assert that because it is new, it must be better than anything that is known to work. It is an anti-engineering view of product development. My first experience of this phenomenon was to watch the “minicomputer” technology of the late 1960s take 5-7 years to learn the need for, and design of, a 1961 operating system. But far and away the funniest instance was the guy teaching a class in how to program microcomputers in 1974-5 who explained this great new software idea – the subroutine! By comparison, however, the software that lands commercial aircraft, and the software that drives automatic braking systems, and the software that runs chemical plants, is deliberately simple, tested in against every contingency the test engineers (who did not do the design and development) can imagine, and then reused without change wherever possible. And that is because there is one major engineering principle at work in those applications – liability! -Ed David - There are many domains where terms are very well-defined, specifically many engineering disciplines exhibit that characteristic …
I will enthusiastically embrace this to mean that “software engineering” is self effacing puffery, since software terms are anything but well-defined. Somewhere there’s got to be a comedy skit showing a Baby Boomer / mainframer & a Millennial talking past each other about the same topics but with different terminology. ____________________________
David Eddy
Babson Park, MA
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