You seem to have the idea that we would make it illegal to write any kind of code if you were not a licensed professional. That's a pretty glaring strawman that

You seem to have the idea that we would make it illegal to write any kind of code if you were not a licensed professional. That's a pretty glaring strawman that you have already dismissed by bringing up autonomous robot heart surgery. You pretty much start with the most important stuff, exactly as you suggested. That's what the market wants. See this history of engineering licensure (https://www.nspe.org/sites/default/files/resources/pdfs/pemagazine/june2007_the_professional_engineering.pdf https://www.nspe.org/sites/default/files/resources/pdfs/pema...): It was originally enacted to stop lawyers and random people claiming to certify the design of huge infrastructure projects for dams and irrigation, where the consequences of failure would be flooding huge areas, causing immeasurable damage. For the same reasons, if you're building dams or nuclear power control systems etc today, I imagine you'd be looking for a similar licensing system. Maybe you would simply use the licensing systems that already exist. The rest of your comment sounds a bit like "it is oppression of my creativity when I build bridges that are made out of four thousand spoons tied together with craft glue and the NTSB says I am largely to blame for it falling on a pedestrian". It is obvious this far into the discipline's history that some things are good ideas and some things aren't, and it is possible to say that if your new 6-week-coding-bootcamp hire doesn't know anything about password hashing you should not give them the job of rewriting the login page. Nobody cares if you write it in Haskell, nobody's trying to draft statewide RIIR legislation, and you are KIDDING yourself if you think that your rebellion against enterprise-y procedural-ish stuff is more important than not letting Russian hackers steal all of your users' sensitive data and sell them to others who will blackmail them for more cash. The market forces are in favour of accrediting the people who work on systems that are important to avoiding pretty dramatic harms, and even death and destruction. People aren't dumb and will eventually wise up enough about the shoddy work that gets done to start suing engineers behind data breaches for negligence (more). You're here proving the article's point by not taking this profession seriously enough to see that even a limited licensing scheme could be warranted.