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You've got one of the big words that I would insert into this discussion -- science. I think the two biggest words missing from here are "science" and "risk." A

You've got one of the big words that I would insert into this discussion -- science. I think the two biggest words missing from here are "science" and "risk." As Alan Kay puts it, science is about getting a description elegant enough that, like the Maxwell equations or Lisp's metacircular evaluator, it fits on a T-shirt. And engineering is about taking that T-shirt and building a bigger more ambitious bridge than anyone could have attempted if they didn't know about forces and stresses and scientific metallurgy. Engineering involves risk tradeoffs, and if your developers are not making your risk decisions then they are not engineers -- and also you're going to spend a lot more money producing software (the authority to do risk assessment should always be as close to the "in the trenches" work as possible, every degree of removal invites the risk decisions to be made on lower-quality more-aggregated more-gutfeel information rather than clear metrics). Most of computer programming is instead tinkering -- build a proof of concept, put it under stress, see what is being stressed, buttress those parts. The fundamental idea of architecture, "let's add some structure in advance so that we can build a self-sustaining system and take away the scaffolding later," is only really seen today maybe in test suites or so? Those are the scaffolds of our day I think. We're still in very early years for computing as a proper engineering discipline. But at least we do make some simple risk calculations.

R0b0t1 5y ago
> Most of computer programming is instead tinkering Most of mechanical engineering is still tinkering. Not all problems are solved. Many of the people here pining for "real engineering in software" need more interdisciplinary experience, ffs.
- balls187 5y ago
  Interdisciplinary experience is something I most engineering educations provide. I can only speak from my undergrad experience, but almost every engineering discipline took the same background courses, as well as mechanical, thermal, fluid, and electrical engineering classes and from there, went on to take courses related directly to their field. From my experience, tinkering is another way to say prototyping or building a proof of concept. As we've gained experience, the need to prototype the same solutions decreases, but when learning new tools and methodologies, experimenting and prototyping is very much part of the engineering process.

R0b0t1 5y ago

> Most of computer programming is instead tinkering Most of mechanical engineering is still tinkering. Not all problems are solved. Many of the people here pining for "real engineering in software" need more interdisciplinary experience, ffs.

balls187 5y ago
Interdisciplinary experience is something I most engineering educations provide. I can only speak from my undergrad experience, but almost every engineering discipline took the same background courses, as well as mechanical, thermal, fluid, and electrical engineering classes and from there, went on to take courses related directly to their field. From my experience, tinkering is another way to say prototyping or building a proof of concept. As we've gained experience, the need to prototype the same solutions decreases, but when learning new tools and methodologies, experimenting and prototyping is very much part of the engineering process.