Software Engineering Must Grow into the Role It’s Now Playing
You wouldn’t get a toymaker to build your bridges, would you?
Software engineering is an outlier among the types of engineering*, in that software engineers are comparatively exempt from physics and consequences.
When you make a mistake in other types of engineering, you fry a circuit board or break a support beam, and have to cool your heels and think about it while you order out for a replacement part. Working with real materials and hardware components has an inherent relationship with constraints of time, energy, and cost.
When you make a mistake with software, all you have to do is hit backspace. The worst you can do is hang your computer, and even that’s not easy to do.
Additionally, when making physical things, it’s hard to get them to do what you want them to do. You want them to move a certain way or move electric charges in a certain pattern. You want your structures to stand up against gravity, which they have an annoying habit of not doing.
Fortunately, you can predict whether your machine will work, before cobbling your parts together. Centuries of work has gone into developing modeling techniques that predict how your machine will perform, and developing heuristics and disciplines of…
