Short of a totalitarian technophobic regime taking power [1], there will always be idiots with compilers willing to do any terrible thing. There's no (non-dyst

Short of a totalitarian technophobic regime taking power [1], there will always be idiots with compilers willing to do any terrible thing. There's no (non-dystopian) hope of regulating things at that point, but we don't really need to. Where regulations, or professional society codes or whatever else, could be usefully applied is where software gets loaded onto something important. You can write all the terrible code you like if it doesn't leave your office, but the moment you package it up and send it out to be installed on a thousand new aircraft (or a million internet-enabled toasters), you're at a ripe point for scrutiny. Can you attest who is responsible for what portions of the code? Have experts signed off on reasonable guarantees of security, safety, and correctness? At that stage, having your engineers be recognized members of a professional society that will hold their feet to the fire to stand by their word is useful. Not all code needs to have an engineer's stamp, but it doesn't make it into a specified set of "serious applications" without stamps. [1] Albeit not implausible, either.