Re:Is Software Engineering Possible?
by convolvatron on Saturday June 10, 2017 @02:31PM
(#14528513)
where are they building reliable systems with the smallest amount of software and complexity and possible?
every place I seem to look people are turning trivial problems into huge and complicated problems by throwing more and more software onto the pile.
Well-known tech companies that sell services instead of software. When a small team is entirely responsible for designing, developing and running a service there's a huge incentive to avoid unnecessary complexity and maximize reliability...
Industrial production of software is as difficult as industrial productions of theorems, patents, scientific discoveries and cocktail recipes.
If the "product" is solving a real-world problem e.g. driving a robot car, than software becomes a tool, like an industrial machine.
In that case software engineering exists, and it's doing very well, and it's about building reliable systems with the smallest amount of software and complexity a possible.
Distributed systems that survive hardware failures and scale up/down automatically and machine learning are prime examples.