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One of my friend pretend that we - software engineers - should work as mechanical engineers. They have a documented, standardized, and limited set of screws, nu

One of my friend pretend that we - software engineers - should work as mechanical engineers. They have a documented, standardized, and limited set of screws, nuts, ... and they build anything with it. This allow to develop CAD tool to assemble, verify, simulate, ... On our side, we have thousands of implementations of basic SW blocks (fifo, mutex, ...), or even "bigger" concepts (server, reader/writer, state-machine ...). What do you think ?

majewsky 8y ago
When we try to standardize software development, we usually end up with people mindlessly chaining together GoF patterns into AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBeans. I don't know why mechanical engineering is different in this regard from software "engineering". Maybe it's because the domain is more restricted (software concerns basically everything, so it's hard to come up with standardized patterns that are still widely applicable). Maybe it's because mechanical engineering is constrained by the laws of physics, whereas software engineering is mostly constrained by the developer's imagination (and resource constraints, but Moore's Law took care of that one for a long time).