[Discuss] Fwd: Re: Programming vs Engineering

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 1/21/2012 10:41 PM, Mark Woodward wrote:
> I have to disagree with you here and while I do see your point about
> licenses, I truly think computing is too immature to establish the
> requirements on which you could establish a licensing process. For
> instance, we don't even have a standard set of measurements nor do we
> have a standard language in which to express computing engineering
> concepts.
> 
> Programming languages and methodologies are still in flux and under
> development. How could a bureaucratic organization in charge or any such
> licensing process not become a useless albatross?

I concur.  Things are so bad in software engineering in terms of broad
agreement of best practices and such that many organizations are happy
to have CMMI compliance. The funny part (not ha-ha funny) of course is
that CMMI is about /managing/ software projects, not /doing/ them.

I would go much farther than Mark did.  Yes, from the perspective of
being able to duplicate successes, software engineering is very
immature.  But from another point of view, software as a whole is
probably the most varied and complex field there is right now.  Computer
science topics are creeping into virtually every field of study.
Software is doing things today that most people hadn't dreamed of 10
years ago.  The key point is that the 'hard problem' that software is
trying to solve is too much of a moving target.

The kinds of things you need to think about when you're reading a few MB
off a local hard drive are radically different from what you need to
worry about when you've got terabytes of data on a SAN/NAS.

Licensing is about having well-established / well-known ways of solving
problems. The problem-space for software is still expanding.  I don't
see how you could come up with licensing until your problem set is
stable (unless you take a very small subset: e.g., JBoss development, or
Win32 driver development).

Matt