On Saturday, 1 September 2018 at 11:32:32 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
I think that his point was more that it's sometimes argued that
software engineering really isn't engineering in the classical
sense. If you're talking about someone like a civil engineer
for instance, the engineer applies well-known and established
principles to everything they do in a disciplined way.
If they are asked to do so. In an attempt to be fancy, the sewage
system in my apartment doesn't have a hydraulic seal, but has a
workaround: one pipe is flexible. How physical is that?
The engineering aspects of civil engineering aren't subjective
at all. They're completely based in the physical sciences.
Software engineering on the other hand isn't based on the
physical sciences at all, and there really isn't general
agreement on what good software engineering principles are.
Like in science, ones based on previous experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering
One of the core issues in software engineering is that its
approaches are not empirical enough because a real-world
validation of approaches is usually absent
That criticism isn't very informed. Also is the problem really in
how it's called?
Issues with management cause other problems on top of all of
that, but even if you have a group of software engineers doing
their absolute best to follow good software engineering
principles without any kind of management interference, what
they're doing is still very different from most engineering
disciplines
Because hardware engineers want to pass certification. Never
heard of what they do when they are not constrained by that? And
even then there's a lot of funny stuff that passes certification
like that x-ray machine and Intel processors.
and it likely wouldn't be hard for another group of competent
software engineers to make solid arguments about why the good
software engineering practices that they're following actually
aren't all that good.
Anything created by humans has flaws and can be criticized.
