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No construction software for bridges will stop the engineer from building unsafe bridges. Why should we need a compiler that will do the same with software? Wh

• samus 4y ago
  The crucial difference between construction engineering and software engineering is the level of accidental complexity it allows. Any junior software engineer can create and ship unmaintainable architectural monstrosities, and most stakeholders might be completely oblivious of that fact and what it means until much later. Software architecture and programming concerns can be difficult to communicate to non-technical people. Regulations and work environments seem to not exist to a sufficient degree in programming to prevent the sort of errors that efforts like from TA are directed against. The attitude of many programmers towards testing would be considered reckless in many other domains. On the other hand, compilers and IDEs have very much become part of our work environment and should help as much as feasible in avoiding as many errors ahead of time. We might also put construction engineering on too much of a pedestal here. Bridges are very well-defined artifacts that humans have been building for centuries. How well exactly are we doing with other infrastructure projects?