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But all you’re saying boils down to the best practices being questionable, not that actually formalizing them into a proper craftsmanship wouldn’t make sense if

But all you’re saying boils down to the best practices being questionable, not that actually formalizing them into a proper craftsmanship wouldn’t make sense if we actually made better best practices. You may talk about gatekeeping all day, but at the end of the day we do want the code in our pacemakers, cars and drones to be written by people following stringent standards, such that we have some idea of the quality. The fact that said standards may not yet exist is not an argument against that, it’s an argument against the status quo in standards.

athrowaway3z 5y ago
> not that actually formalizing them into a proper craftsmanship wouldn’t make sense if we actually made better best practices. This is the start of a bureaucracy that will grind progress to a halt. Because now instead of solving problems we get to create a commission who can appoint a club that have the right to appoint the master craftsmen who will be capable enough to formalize best practices. If you think that's hyperbole on how this stuff works, it is not. Furthermore, why would we assume people who enjoy debating best practices know actual master craftsmen? > The fact that said standards may not yet exist is not an argument against that, it’s an argument against the status quo in standards. The fact that said standards have been tried, and you don't know about them is a very strong argument against them.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  > This is the start of a bureaucracy that will grind progress to a halt. Because now instead of solving problems we get to create a commission who can appoint a club that have the right to appoint the master craftsmen who will be capable enough to formalize best practices. This bureaucracy already exists, across myriads of RFCs, language design committees, FOSS groups, GitHub issues, Gitter servers, listservs. This process already exists, it just bumbles along inconsistently from community to community, company to company, project to project. And perhaps it should, because no size fits all. But it does exist and any attempt at formalizing them would not cause the start of a bureaucracy to exist, because such bureaucracies are in abundance in software development already.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    If you define a bureaucracy making best practices so broadly as to capture GitHub issues, then the term becomes meaningless. The sense the OP is trying to argue for (rather unsuccessfully) is a government bureaucracy that forbids people from deviating from those best practices. This is "serious", you see, whereas a competitive market of ideas leading to the organic development of best practices (what we have now) is "trivial". The problem with that idea is that although it pleases people who associate government control with seriousness, the evidence it actually leads to better outcomes is mixed at best, and negative at worst. Regulatory capture is a real problem in many industries, and the attempt to fix things with regulated "best practices" can often be short term hacks that also inconveniently render more robust long term fixes illegal (finance has a lot of problems like this). In the software world you can look at things like MISRA-C or FIPS to get a taste of what everything would look like if we don't keep systematically pushing back against these misguided people.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      I don’t think government control is necessary. Much of what the OP is talking about can be undertaken by industry standards, or just by enough software engineers and software firms agreeing upon it, whether through a body like an IEEE or unofficially like how Agile spread in popularity.
      - native_samples 5y ago
        We agree then! But the article author disagrees: "Software practitioners should be licensed and be bound by a professional ethical code where violation of said code would result in the revocation of the license to practice software engineering." The article very clearly argues for government control of who can be a programmer or not (who is doing the revoking, otherwise). That would be destructive, fatal to innovation and totally counterproductive.
        Apocryphon 5y ago
        Sure, though this discussion doesn't have to be limited to the OP's constraints.
endymi0n 5y ago
The issue with standards is that they only capture a very, very small part of the problem. Let‘s look at the results: NASA probably uses some of the most rigorous development and testing methods in the world, but I‘d still rather trust my life to the flight control software of SpaceX who doesn‘t give a damn about education. The banks losing data mentioned by OP are way more rigid in their hiring and certification standards than a Stripe for example. Who would you rather trust on security? My point is: I’m all for better code, but Culture trumps certification and standards every single time.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  > NASA probably uses some of the most rigorous development and testing methods in the world, but I‘d still rather trust my life to the flight control software of SpaceX who doesn‘t give a damn about education. Why? Have there been any NASA manned accidents that were caused by software? There's certainly been big historical bloopers in the past involving unmanned probes, like getting metric and imperial mixed up, but doubtless NASA software quality is better now. And what is your basis that SpaceX doesn't care about education, while NASA does? Are you a hiring manager at either? > The banks losing data mentioned by OP are way more rigid in their hiring and certification standards than a Stripe for example. Who would you rather trust on security? Is that true that banks are more rigid in those standards? Or Stripe is more lax?
  - thatjoeoverthr 5y ago
    There are only three deadly incidents to choose from, thankfully, and it happens they were caused by other kinds of (presumably licensed) engineers. Software incidents include a flight computer failure during the landing of Apollo 11. Another incident caused reset of their navigation computer, requiring them to recalibrate it using a tangible sextant. If we go a little beyond literal NASA, it’s not hard to find computer failures. Aside from the infamous 737 Max, we have the loss of a B-2 on takeoff, which costs the same as a space shuttle. (Thankfully the pilots ejected.) Then the famous story of the Patriot missiles’ first deployment. If I actually Google this, will I find no more?
rmbyrro 5y ago
> better best practices Really? No, seriously, where will this end? Now we need better BEST practices? I mean. This "best practices" wagon is just a nonsense. My impression is some people don't want the burden of thinking, so they want something to memorize. And blame when things go wrong - which they inevitably will, as in any and all "crafts" and "professions". Engineering, medicine, etc, are all full of examples of failures. Is this evidence they should get rid of certifications and all bureaucracy? No. Is software failures an evidence we should have more bureaucracy? No, it's evidence we need to think more and memorize less.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Then perhaps the best practices shouldn't be rules for rote memorization, but better approaches towards thinking and reasoning about code. Maybe this field could use more discipline in how it approaches not just creating code but reading code. What is the use of thinking if it's not guided by methodology? Didn't many of us study computer science?
  - FeepingCreature 5y ago
    Programming science does not exist.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      And yet, programming claims to be guided by computer science.
      - native_samples 5y ago
        Universities claim programming is guided by computer science, because they love sticking the label "science" on non-scientific things. The average working programmer probably doesn't care whether their work is considered a science or not. Certainly I feel like the ROI on reading CS papers in my own career has been quite low. They have a habit of sounding useful and impactful until you finish reading them and realize there's a pretty major catch. I have a degree named "computer science" but it's questionable whether it was really scientific, given that science is usually defined as a study of the natural world. There's nothing natural about computer programming, outside of perhaps complexity theory. You could argue that maybe at the edges deep learning is blurring into a study of naturalistic phenomena, but you have to be careful, otherwise you reclassify pure maths as a science and I think everyone agrees that it's a separate thing.

athrowaway3z 5y ago

> not that actually formalizing them into a proper craftsmanship wouldn’t make sense if we actually made better best practices. This is the start of a bureaucracy that will grind progress to a halt. Because now instead of solving problems we get to create a commission who can appoint a club that have the right to appoint the master craftsmen who will be capable enough to formalize best practices. If you think that's hyperbole on how this stuff works, it is not. Furthermore, why would we assume people who enjoy debating best practices know actual master craftsmen? > The fact that said standards may not yet exist is not an argument against that, it’s an argument against the status quo in standards. The fact that said standards have been tried, and you don't know about them is a very strong argument against them.

Apocryphon 5y ago
> This is the start of a bureaucracy that will grind progress to a halt. Because now instead of solving problems we get to create a commission who can appoint a club that have the right to appoint the master craftsmen who will be capable enough to formalize best practices. This bureaucracy already exists, across myriads of RFCs, language design committees, FOSS groups, GitHub issues, Gitter servers, listservs. This process already exists, it just bumbles along inconsistently from community to community, company to company, project to project. And perhaps it should, because no size fits all. But it does exist and any attempt at formalizing them would not cause the start of a bureaucracy to exist, because such bureaucracies are in abundance in software development already.
- native_samples 5y ago
  If you define a bureaucracy making best practices so broadly as to capture GitHub issues, then the term becomes meaningless. The sense the OP is trying to argue for (rather unsuccessfully) is a government bureaucracy that forbids people from deviating from those best practices. This is "serious", you see, whereas a competitive market of ideas leading to the organic development of best practices (what we have now) is "trivial". The problem with that idea is that although it pleases people who associate government control with seriousness, the evidence it actually leads to better outcomes is mixed at best, and negative at worst. Regulatory capture is a real problem in many industries, and the attempt to fix things with regulated "best practices" can often be short term hacks that also inconveniently render more robust long term fixes illegal (finance has a lot of problems like this). In the software world you can look at things like MISRA-C or FIPS to get a taste of what everything would look like if we don't keep systematically pushing back against these misguided people.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    I don’t think government control is necessary. Much of what the OP is talking about can be undertaken by industry standards, or just by enough software engineers and software firms agreeing upon it, whether through a body like an IEEE or unofficially like how Agile spread in popularity.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      We agree then! But the article author disagrees: "Software practitioners should be licensed and be bound by a professional ethical code where violation of said code would result in the revocation of the license to practice software engineering." The article very clearly argues for government control of who can be a programmer or not (who is doing the revoking, otherwise). That would be destructive, fatal to innovation and totally counterproductive.
      - Apocryphon 5y ago
        Sure, though this discussion doesn't have to be limited to the OP's constraints.

endymi0n 5y ago

The issue with standards is that they only capture a very, very small part of the problem. Let‘s look at the results: NASA probably uses some of the most rigorous development and testing methods in the world, but I‘d still rather trust my life to the flight control software of SpaceX who doesn‘t give a damn about education. The banks losing data mentioned by OP are way more rigid in their hiring and certification standards than a Stripe for example. Who would you rather trust on security? My point is: I’m all for better code, but Culture trumps certification and standards every single time.

Apocryphon 5y ago
> NASA probably uses some of the most rigorous development and testing methods in the world, but I‘d still rather trust my life to the flight control software of SpaceX who doesn‘t give a damn about education. Why? Have there been any NASA manned accidents that were caused by software? There's certainly been big historical bloopers in the past involving unmanned probes, like getting metric and imperial mixed up, but doubtless NASA software quality is better now. And what is your basis that SpaceX doesn't care about education, while NASA does? Are you a hiring manager at either? > The banks losing data mentioned by OP are way more rigid in their hiring and certification standards than a Stripe for example. Who would you rather trust on security? Is that true that banks are more rigid in those standards? Or Stripe is more lax?
- thatjoeoverthr 5y ago
  There are only three deadly incidents to choose from, thankfully, and it happens they were caused by other kinds of (presumably licensed) engineers. Software incidents include a flight computer failure during the landing of Apollo 11. Another incident caused reset of their navigation computer, requiring them to recalibrate it using a tangible sextant. If we go a little beyond literal NASA, it’s not hard to find computer failures. Aside from the infamous 737 Max, we have the loss of a B-2 on takeoff, which costs the same as a space shuttle. (Thankfully the pilots ejected.) Then the famous story of the Patriot missiles’ first deployment. If I actually Google this, will I find no more?

rmbyrro 5y ago

> better best practices Really? No, seriously, where will this end? Now we need better BEST practices? I mean. This "best practices" wagon is just a nonsense. My impression is some people don't want the burden of thinking, so they want something to memorize. And blame when things go wrong - which they inevitably will, as in any and all "crafts" and "professions". Engineering, medicine, etc, are all full of examples of failures. Is this evidence they should get rid of certifications and all bureaucracy? No. Is software failures an evidence we should have more bureaucracy? No, it's evidence we need to think more and memorize less.

Apocryphon 5y ago
Then perhaps the best practices shouldn't be rules for rote memorization, but better approaches towards thinking and reasoning about code. Maybe this field could use more discipline in how it approaches not just creating code but reading code. What is the use of thinking if it's not guided by methodology? Didn't many of us study computer science?
- FeepingCreature 5y ago
  Programming science does not exist.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    And yet, programming claims to be guided by computer science.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      Universities claim programming is guided by computer science, because they love sticking the label "science" on non-scientific things. The average working programmer probably doesn't care whether their work is considered a science or not. Certainly I feel like the ROI on reading CS papers in my own career has been quite low. They have a habit of sounding useful and impactful until you finish reading them and realize there's a pretty major catch. I have a degree named "computer science" but it's questionable whether it was really scientific, given that science is usually defined as a study of the natural world. There's nothing natural about computer programming, outside of perhaps complexity theory. You could argue that maybe at the edges deep learning is blurring into a study of naturalistic phenomena, but you have to be careful, otherwise you reclassify pure maths as a science and I think everyone agrees that it's a separate thing.