No, I wouldn't trust my life to my code, because I don't need to. Quality matters, and defects can serious financial consequences (for instance, losing data ca

No, I wouldn't trust my life to my code, because I don't need to. Quality matters, and defects can serious financial consequences (for instance, losing data can have a serious and measurable impact). But in the trade-off between innovation and risk, I should probably position myself fairly aggressively. Like most programmers, I'm in a position where it's probably better for me to make and recover from mistakes than to avoid mistakes altogether. This is what I think the "software is like building a bridge" analogy is so inappropriate. If you're going to hold software accountable for its relative lack of reliability, you should also acknowledge that the innovation from this field has been astounding. Would licensing help things? Would the space shuttle control system software become very reliable if only those software "engineers" were licensed? I seriously, seriously doubt it. But I do think that "software engineers" would slowly succeed in choking off a competitive and free environment. In a nightmare scenario, you'd have to major in "software engineering" instead of math or physics to be legally allowed to write code, self study would be banned, and something like Ruby on Rails would be illegal because the people who wrote the EJB specs don't like it. Look at the activities of the ABA or AMA. That nightmare scenario isn't as impossible as you might think. And I'm pretty sure that it would hurt innovation in software severely, in exchange for a safety and security that 1) it wouldn't deliver anyway, and 2) we don't need in the first place.