This thread on Hacker News terrifies me

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 08:42:38PM +0000, Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 31 August 2018 at 19:50:20 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17880722
[...]
> > And on and on. It's unbelievable. The conventional wisdom in
> > software for how to deal with programming bugs simply does not
> > exist.
> > 
> > Here's the same topic on Reddit with the same awful ideas:
[...]
> Some countries do have engineering certifications and professional
> permits for software engineering, but its still a minority.
[...]

It's precisely for this reason that the title "software engineer" makes
me cringe on the one hand, and snicker on the other hand.  I honestly
cannot keep a straight face when using the word "engineering" to
describe what a typical programmer does in the industry these days.

Where are the procedures, documentations, verification processes,
safeguards, certifications, culpability, etc., etc., that make
engineering the respected profession that it is?  They are essentially
absent in typical software development environments, or only poorly aped
in the most laughable ways.  Most "enterprise" software has no proper
design document at all; what little documentation does exist is merely a
lip-service shoddy hack-job done after the fact to justify the cowboying
that has gone on before.  It's an embarrassment to call this
"engineering", and a shame to real engineers who have actual engineering
procedures to follow.

Until the software industry gets its act together and become a real,
respectable engineering field, we will continue to suffer from
unreliable software that malfunctions, eats your data, and crashes on
unusual inputs for no good reason other than that it was never properly
engineered.  And malware and catastrophic security breaches will
continue to run rampant in spite of millions and billions of dollars
being poured into improving security every year.  And of course, more
and more of modern life is becoming dependent on devices controlled by
software of such calibre (IoT... *shudder*).  It's a miracle that
society hasn't collapsed yet!


T

-- 
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