Re:Lost in Math
by marcosdumay on Sunday July 01, 2018 @12:13PM
(#17436155)
Civil engineering is much older than formal modeling. Mechanical engineering is younger than the civil one, but still older than modeling. In fact, when the modeling fad came from the study of the sky into everyday stuff, there was even process engineering happening on the wild.
The only reasonable definition of "engineering" that I know of is on the lines of "the art of building stuff". Writing software fits that definition perfectly well, it's just what people call "software engineering" that doesn't.
Yep this entire thread is a series of arguments over the definition of "engineering." The underlying point seems to be "engineering is serious business and software is not," and the "definition" of engineering is used as a bludgeon to make that point.
There isn't much of that in application software engineering. Some domains have it, like ML and DSP, but most of the code written for startups is ad hoc carpentry, plumbing, and masonry, not applied physics.
You can do a lot with carpentry, plumbing, and masonry without really knowing what you're doing - up to a certain scale. But when you start building giant things without rigorous non-tribal reasons for your design choices, you're only ever going to build things that fall down and break a lot.
Too harsh? I think it's hard to find anyone today who thinks software is acceptably robust and reliable by default. Some products/apps/pages work just fine if not stressed too hard. But generally security, bugs, and efficiency are all poor compared to comparable challenges in hard engineering disciplines.