5 ms·

Why is it mechanical engineers have standard sizes for all nuts and bolts but software engineers can't pull off the same feat?

bokchoi 4y ago
I'd say some things have been standardized quite well - 8 bit bytes, Unicode, http. It's the application layer that isn't standardized.
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Because we're still stumbling on what is and isn't a "bad practice" while companies continue to gaslight the developer population and a few consultants and spokesmen have endless discussions on what should and shouldn't happen. Ergo, there's no incentive to fix it, and every incentive to keep it broken.
throwaway787544 4y ago
Standardization of threads started between private companies around the year 1800, and continued on mixed in with a bunch of other "competing" private company standards. Sick of the lack of a unified standard, William Sellers submitted a paper in 1864 proposing one standard based on an already popular form. Eventually the USG adopted this as a requirement in government contracts, was adopted as United States Standard thread, and later Unified Thread Standard. The standard is maintained by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and American National Standards Institute. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_thread#History_of_standardization https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_thread#History_of_stan... Get the government to require a standard for all their software and anyone who wants a government contract will have to conform.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Further parts of that story: - As noted at Wikipedia, wartime mechanisation and the requirements for standard parts to be provided for the new high technology of motorised transport, armour, and aircraft, drove further standardisation. - The noted socialist and collectivist,[1] Herbert Hoover, provided the final push toward standardisation of weights, measures, and engineering components, as Secretary of Commerce. It turns out that military needs and government legal authority and purchasing power can do much to promote standardisation which the free market cannot. A subsequent case emerged during the Vietnam War during which the US Navy, a/k/a the transport and logistics arm of the US military forces, faced a critical problem in delivering supplies and materiel to very underdeveloped South Vietnamese ports. Though there'd been multiple attempts to standardise shipping around a single container size, this proved to be the ultimate nudge which established the TFU, or twenty-foot unit standard. (Now largely seen in its doubled form, the 40-foot shipping container.) ________________________________ Notes: 1. Sarcasm, gentle reader.
eptcyka 4y ago
Incompatibility is incentivized monetarily. Everyone wants to build something with a captive audience.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  That's a pessimistic view at best. Could it just be that compatibility is not monetarily incentivized? And incompatibility is not punished by some regulation enforcement bureau?
  - alaricus 4y ago
    EU is now forcing tech companies to be compatible. It will take time, but EU is the only major force pushing for interoperability.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > That's a pessimistic view at best. No, it's something that one would be fired as a decisionmaker for not understanding. It's basic.
- I_Hate_Devs 4y ago
  It's not just that, it's more born out of ego. Every idiot who can write a CRUD app thinks they're Zuckerberg building the next big thing. Unless you're working in specialized arenas of FAANG, you're not, and that's okay.
- alaricus 4y ago
  This is the correct answer.
I_Hate_Devs 4y ago
Those of us experienced in DevOps have been trying to set standards for repo/project structure, deployments, etc. for quite a while, but it seems like every developer has their own idea of what they did the first time they read a blog post about "how to build X app" and then will use a different structure after they consume their next Medium article. Or, even better, they're been "doing it this way for 10 years", or "I heard Facebook/Amazon, etc. does X".
drewcoo 4y ago
We're currently in the stage when we create all of our own bespoke connectors - glue code. RESTful interfaces are an attempt at solving part of the problem but they still require a lot of hand fiddling to make them work. While mechanical connectors have existed for millennia, standardized connectors were a set of fairly recent innovations from the industrial revolution [1], with notable standardizations like unified thread as recent as post-WWII. So they're both new and took time for all of the standardizations to settle to what we have now. And the state of mechanical connectors is not static. There is constant innovation. Consider medical, military, and other applications with special demands. Seen in that light, software is very rapidly standardizing. Like everyone else here, I feel your pain, though. [1] https://www.nord-lock.com/insights/knowledge/2017/the-history-of-the-bolt/ https://www.nord-lock.com/insights/knowledge/2017/the-histor...
seclorum_wien 4y ago
No software ever works without defining nuts and/or bolts. Software is language. It is as slippery as all other human languages when you try to pin it down to absolutes.
hwayne 4y ago
McMaster-Carr offers 1,533 different kinds of thumb screws with 27 different thread sizes. https://www.mcmaster.com/screws/thumb-screws/ https://www.mcmaster.com/screws/thumb-screws/
musicale 4y ago
Software nuts and bolts are standardized: - instruction sets (e.g. x86, ARM) - 8 bit bytes (though there are two byte orders) - floating point formats and operations - programming languages (Java, JavaScript, C++...) - standard libraries (Java SE, libc, stl...) - OS APIs (Win32, POSIX...) - network protocols (HTTP, TLS, TCP/IP, BGP...) - data formats (HTML, XML, JSON, MIME, protobufs...) However the design complexity of software, with potentially dozens of levels of abstractions and millions of lines of code, isn't greatly reduced by using these standard nuts and bolts.

bokchoi 4y ago

I'd say some things have been standardized quite well - 8 bit bytes, Unicode, http. It's the application layer that isn't standardized.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

Because we're still stumbling on what is and isn't a "bad practice" while companies continue to gaslight the developer population and a few consultants and spokesmen have endless discussions on what should and shouldn't happen. Ergo, there's no incentive to fix it, and every incentive to keep it broken.

throwaway787544 4y ago

Standardization of threads started between private companies around the year 1800, and continued on mixed in with a bunch of other "competing" private company standards. Sick of the lack of a unified standard, William Sellers submitted a paper in 1864 proposing one standard based on an already popular form. Eventually the USG adopted this as a requirement in government contracts, was adopted as United States Standard thread, and later Unified Thread Standard. The standard is maintained by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and American National Standards Institute. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_thread#History_of_standardization https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_thread#History_of_stan... Get the government to require a standard for all their software and anyone who wants a government contract will have to conform.

dredmorbius 4y ago
Further parts of that story: - As noted at Wikipedia, wartime mechanisation and the requirements for standard parts to be provided for the new high technology of motorised transport, armour, and aircraft, drove further standardisation. - The noted socialist and collectivist,[1] Herbert Hoover, provided the final push toward standardisation of weights, measures, and engineering components, as Secretary of Commerce. It turns out that military needs and government legal authority and purchasing power can do much to promote standardisation which the free market cannot. A subsequent case emerged during the Vietnam War during which the US Navy, a/k/a the transport and logistics arm of the US military forces, faced a critical problem in delivering supplies and materiel to very underdeveloped South Vietnamese ports. Though there'd been multiple attempts to standardise shipping around a single container size, this proved to be the ultimate nudge which established the TFU, or twenty-foot unit standard. (Now largely seen in its doubled form, the 40-foot shipping container.) ________________________________ Notes: 1. Sarcasm, gentle reader.

eptcyka 4y ago

Incompatibility is incentivized monetarily. Everyone wants to build something with a captive audience.

drewcoo 4y ago
That's a pessimistic view at best. Could it just be that compatibility is not monetarily incentivized? And incompatibility is not punished by some regulation enforcement bureau?
- alaricus 4y ago
  EU is now forcing tech companies to be compatible. It will take time, but EU is the only major force pushing for interoperability.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > That's a pessimistic view at best. No, it's something that one would be fired as a decisionmaker for not understanding. It's basic.
I_Hate_Devs 4y ago
It's not just that, it's more born out of ego. Every idiot who can write a CRUD app thinks they're Zuckerberg building the next big thing. Unless you're working in specialized arenas of FAANG, you're not, and that's okay.
alaricus 4y ago
This is the correct answer.

I_Hate_Devs 4y ago

Those of us experienced in DevOps have been trying to set standards for repo/project structure, deployments, etc. for quite a while, but it seems like every developer has their own idea of what they did the first time they read a blog post about "how to build X app" and then will use a different structure after they consume their next Medium article. Or, even better, they're been "doing it this way for 10 years", or "I heard Facebook/Amazon, etc. does X".

drewcoo 4y ago

We're currently in the stage when we create all of our own bespoke connectors - glue code. RESTful interfaces are an attempt at solving part of the problem but they still require a lot of hand fiddling to make them work. While mechanical connectors have existed for millennia, standardized connectors were a set of fairly recent innovations from the industrial revolution [1], with notable standardizations like unified thread as recent as post-WWII. So they're both new and took time for all of the standardizations to settle to what we have now. And the state of mechanical connectors is not static. There is constant innovation. Consider medical, military, and other applications with special demands. Seen in that light, software is very rapidly standardizing. Like everyone else here, I feel your pain, though. [1] https://www.nord-lock.com/insights/knowledge/2017/the-history-of-the-bolt/ https://www.nord-lock.com/insights/knowledge/2017/the-histor...

seclorum_wien 4y ago

No software ever works without defining nuts and/or bolts. Software is language. It is as slippery as all other human languages when you try to pin it down to absolutes.

hwayne 4y ago

McMaster-Carr offers 1,533 different kinds of thumb screws with 27 different thread sizes. https://www.mcmaster.com/screws/thumb-screws/ https://www.mcmaster.com/screws/thumb-screws/

musicale 4y ago

Software nuts and bolts are standardized: - instruction sets (e.g. x86, ARM) - 8 bit bytes (though there are two byte orders) - floating point formats and operations - programming languages (Java, JavaScript, C++...) - standard libraries (Java SE, libc, stl...) - OS APIs (Win32, POSIX...) - network protocols (HTTP, TLS, TCP/IP, BGP...) - data formats (HTML, XML, JSON, MIME, protobufs...) However the design complexity of software, with potentially dozens of levels of abstractions and millions of lines of code, isn't greatly reduced by using these standard nuts and bolts.