But it isn't engineering. Not really. The number of things you can measure and plan for in advance of implementation are much, much smaller than the number of things you need to build every day. Engineering is a discipline with thousands of years of practice and study behind it, and the traditional 'best practice' is far more likely to work than ones from the programming world. What's more, once the plans have been written, implementation, even prototyping, are predictable and tend to proceed apace. Engineers do not guess, and they test much less than we do, because unless they're working on the bleeding edge, the results are a forgone conclusion for all but the most intricate constructs.

In programming, the map is the territory, and in the time you can map out and nail down all of the unpredictable bits of a program, you could have written it already. We also don't have the luxury of physical laws. The few natural laws that do apply, the speed of light and time complexity, are so rarified and remote that they don't apply most of the time. We share more with the mathematician than the engineer, but even that comparison rings hollow.

We create programs custom built for a purpose, using rules of thumb and our own aesthetic instincts, that meet a need. Craftsman seems appropriate.