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> A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering sh
by Jakob 3y ago
> A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot."
– Edsger W. Dijkstra (source: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF)
- Macha 3y agoI mean, this attitude (and the knowledge that it is held by hiring individuals in computing) certainly explains why the demand is high for CS amongst people who want to do software engineering as a career, but I've also encounter interns/grads from some CS courses where it's clear they've followed this attitude to eschewing practice to such an extent that the graduates are having difficulty. It turns out in most jobs you do use things like soft skills, version control, SQL, etc. more than number theory, formal verification, Forth or UML.
- jeremyjh 3y agoYes but do you want a 4 year degree that focuses on those soft skills? I think that is what he was criticizing - certainly what he said could not be construed as applying to actual practitioners in industry.
- chromoblob 3y agoAnother quote from there: "if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger."