That post is excellent and is now in my bookmarks. I'm glad I asked for clarification because when you mentioned licensing, I first thought that you meant thin

That post is excellent and is now in my bookmarks. I'm glad I asked for clarification because when you mentioned licensing, I first thought that you meant things like software licenses. Now, I know you mean things like engineer licenses. Up to this point, I personally would like licensing, but only for the most critical projects, such as avionics, nuclear power plants, crytography, and perhaps even foundational projects like compilers. But only those things. So I am glad you made me aware that people who want licensing tend to go overboard with it. That means I will need to reconsider my position. I wonder how the engineering world has solved that problem, or if they even have. > I think that "supply chain" dependencies (like standard SDKs and libraries that are used as a "baseline") are juicy hack targets (think SolarWinds). Yeah, this is one reason I wiped all outside code from the repo where I am building my software. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] > Software needs to be flexible. It's very, very difficult to have flexibility and Quality shacking up together. In the company I worked for, the hardware people insisted that flexible software was automatically "bad quality," so we were forced to apply rigid hardware development methodologies to software development; with ghastly results. I think that this can be done with good design, which is the reason why my Design phase part of process is so long. I have many reasons to think so, but a good intro to my thoughts is "Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain" talk by Runar Bjarnason. [6] Of course, this only goes so far, but I have found it works in practice. A good example is the bc/dc I wrote. I constrained its behavior a lot with assertions and maintaining the assumptions that the assertions test. I also implement a lot of the code with respect to constant data, i.e., I use constant data to define the behavior of code. (An example of this is the list of bc keywords, or the translation between characters and dc commands.) The end result is actually a program that is fairly easy to extend: I simply relax the assumptions or change the constant data, with some exceptions where extension is harder because of bad design, like [7]. Nevertheless, you are completely right: software needs to be flexible, and flexibility and Quality often hate each other. Maybe that's what makes software a harder thing to get Quality out of than hardware, or architecture, or engineering? [1]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/commit/31b97508f https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/commit/31b97508f [2]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/commit/dd1cc3795 https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/commit/dd1cc3795 [3]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/commit/2ba7c20a9 https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/commit/2ba7c20a9 [4]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/commit/4560fb115 https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/commit/4560fb115 [5]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/commit/3c4bce0bb https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/commit/3c4bce0bb [6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqmsQeSzMdw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqmsQeSzMdw [7]: https://git.yzena.com/gavin/bc/commit/8a1d001dcfc https://git.yzena.com/gavin/bc/commit/8a1d001dcfc