Some pieces are more important than others. Those are the bits that need to be carefully regulated, as if they were bridges. But not everything we build has lives on the line.

If that means we don't get to call ourselves "engineers", I'm good with that. We work with bits, not atoms, and we can develop our own new way of handling that.

Neither do I. Neither did Dijkstra. EWD1036, “On the cruelty of really teaching computing science”, is about education reform, to enable those who don't "happen to have just the right mind set" to fully participate in actual, effective programming.

I suspect this particular title-exaggeration is fueling this particular fire.

Going forward, I believe we need to be aware that software controlled mechanics grew out of two disparate disciplines; it presently lacks the holistic thinking that long-integrated industries do.