Is there a term for all tasks around programming?

[Ian Collins]

It really depends on the level of competence and responsibility which
society requires from those who wish to do a specific job.

Quite. Society requires a ABS computer to function to the same standard
as the mechanical components in a vehicle's brakes. Society requires
the flight control computers to be as reliable as the aircraft's engines.

Very few modern engineering projects are single discipline. They are
built from a diverse range of components, both mechanical, electronic
and software. All of these are critical to the operation of the
product. All of these have to be built to the same high standards
following the same strict engineering practices.

For example, do
you believe that someone who manages to develop spreadsheets with
conditional statements is, due to that, an engineer? What about someone who
manages to put together a shell script/batch file? What about putting
together a "hello world" program in visual basic? Or developing a tic-tac-
toe program in Python? Or developing a text editor in C++? Does the
ability to perform any of those tasks, on it's own, bestows onto anyone the
right to call what he does as being engineering? Do you consider someone
who managed to learn how to write some C++ code in his spare time to be an
engineer?

Every field of engineering has shed tinkerers, we'd probably still be
leaving in trees without them.

Do you consider James Dyson to be an engineer? How about Frank Whittle?

The thing is, the requirements for someone to be considered an engineer are
similar in nature to the requirements that society imposes on who is and who
is not a physician or a surgeon or a dentist or a lawyer. Those titles are
reserved to those among us which are granted the right to perform services
which require a high level of training, competence and responsibility. If
society doesn't require that a task should be reserved to a carefully
selected group of people in order to safeguard society's best interests then
no such demands are put in place.

Society knows very little about the individuals behind most engineering
projects. Society puts it's trust in the companies who produce the
products to employ suitably qualified staff. Unlike medical or legal
practitioners, it is the manufacturer who ends up in the dock, not the
individual engineer.

 

[Ebenezer]

Quite.  Society requires a ABS computer to function to the same standard
as the mechanical components in a vehicle's brakes.  Society requires
the flight control computers to be as reliable as the aircraft's engines.

Very few modern engineering projects are single discipline.  They are
built from a diverse range of components, both mechanical, electronic
and software.  All of these are critical to the operation of the
product.  All of these have to be built to the same high standards
following the same strict engineering practices.


Every field of engineering has shed tinkerers, we'd probably still be
leaving in trees without them.

Do you consider James Dyson to be an engineer? How about Frank Whittle?


Society knows very little about the individuals behind most engineering
projects.  Society puts it's trust in the companies who produce the
products to employ suitably qualified staff.  Unlike medical or legal
practitioners, it is the manufacturer who ends up in the dock, not the
individual engineer.

The national motto of the United States is:
In G-d we trust. The motto was part of our
becoming a great nation.


Brian Wood
Ebenezer Enterprises
http://webEbenezer.net

 

[Ian Collins]

The national motto of the United States is:
In G-d we trust. The motto was part of our
becoming a great nation.

With a withering debt to match!

No sound engineering practices there...

 

[Miles Bader]

The national motto of the United States is: In G-d we trust.

When are they gonna get rid of that, anyway?

"E Pluribus Unum" is _vastly_ cooler, more historically resonant, and
really, more accurate.

The motto was part of our becoming a great nation.

Hmm, not really. The U.S. has only had an official motto since the
'50s, and lets face it, the U.S. hasn't exactly been a shining start
since then...

-Miles

 

[Nick Keighley]

And if an electrician screws up and someone gets electrocuted he will also
be held liable for his screwup.  Yet, that doesn't mean that an electrician
is an engineer.

Just because a given task is technical in nature it doesn't mean it is
engineering, and software development is clearly one of those cases.  

argument by repetition

Similarly, it is also not architecture.  It is what it is.


...nor it is supposed to be.  A software developer doesn't suddenly become
an engineer if he targets a platform other than a desktop.

but the product is liable to be judged to a higher standard if its
controlling brakes rather than a word processor (though we'd like a
word processors to work as well...)

 

[none]

Stating that an occupation isn't engineering is not denigrating somebody or
their work. It can only be seen as a way to denigrate someone if that
person happens to desperately want a fancy title to feel better about
themselves, and this is just wrong. There is a reason why society felt the
need to punish those who misappropriated professional titles.

The odd thing about your comment is that in some circles, particularly hard
science and math, engineering is looked down on. I guess one man's trash is
another man's treasure.

When I was studying Electrical Engineering at University, some of our
courses were shared with the Physics department and the Physic
Engineering department. (or is it Engineering Physics? "Genie
Physique" in French). The difference between the three courses (in a
jokey biased way) was said to be:

Physics: It doesn't work but they know why.
Physic Engineering: It doesn't work and they don't know why.
Electrical Engineering: It works but they don't know why.

I guess that was meant to denigrate Physic Engineering. But
to this day, I am still not sure if Physics or Electrical Engineering
came out the worse of the other two

Yannick

 

[none]

Which mailing list are we talking about? Are you referring to
comp.lang.c++? Because claiming that this newsgroup is "dedicated to
engineering", or even insinuating that writing C++ code is engineering,
would be an even more glaring mistake.



I haven't made such a claim, nor I believe I will ever do, mainly because it
goes against society's best interests to increase the costs associated with
developing software. Society doesn't grind to a halt, nor does it suffer
any relevant losses, if a text editor segfaults or if an OS throws a blue
screen of death.

This statement is rather confused. You give two examples of what you
consider software bugs with minor consequences. However, in the
modern world, the consequences of a bug in software have to potential
to dwarf almost any other traditional engineering discipline mistakes.

Society wouldn't grind to a halt either if a construction project of a
local shopping mall gets delayed because the Civil Engineer didn't do
his computations correctly, a roof collapse and they need to demolish
a large part of the building in order to restart on solid fundations.

On the other hand, society would pretty much grind to a halt if the
software that is used to compute peoples income tax starts misbehaving
and starts sending a large amount of overdue tax claims all around the
country.

Society would pretty much grind to a halt if a bug in fly-by-wire or
ILS caused a few aircrafts to crash.

Society could literally grind to a halt if the traffic control system
software of a major city started misbehaving.

So certainly, the difference between engineering and not engineering
can't be based solely on the potential consequences of a mistake.

Yannick

 

[Rui Maciel]

argument by repetition

And it's a shame it is necessary to repeat it. This has been covered
before.

but the product is liable to be judged to a higher standard if its
controlling brakes rather than a word processor (though we'd like a
word processors to work as well...)

Again, the contribution to the design and production of a product/service
whose shortcomings may lead the ones responsible to be held liable does make
an engineer out of everyone who has been involved in that project. There
are plenty of other technical fields who rely on technicians to develop
important parts of a project, including in the design stage, and yet there
is still no reason to label them with titles such as engineer or architect.
So, why would this be any different with writing software?


Rui Maciel

 

[BGB]

I like your definitions. How about this?

* Software Architect - Designs frameworks, communication and
dependencies in applications and between applications.

* Software Engineer - Designs specific modules in an application, often
specialized in some field like mathematics, protocols, or certain domain
specific knowledge.

* Coder - Implements specifications. Could be a person directly from
school.

fair enough, however often the roles of architects and engineers are not
often so clearly separated, or in smaller projects, there may not be
much separation between the people doing the design and the people doing
the programming.

a lot depends likely on the size of the project and the size of the
team, as well as potentially on the particular "development culture" in
play, ...

 

[Jorgen Grahn]

On 09/22/2011 03:12 PM, none Yannick Tremblay wrote: ....

True, however, Configuration Management focus on a /part/ of, let's call
it Development Support. Also, Configuration Management usually only
involves a few people per team.

I repeat myself, but I have to disagree again.

There may be a guy called "the CM" and he may even be useful --
keeping track of large-scale things and providing advice. But
if I as a programmer pretend that CM is someone else's problem,
I'm not doing my job. I need to make the work I do blend in well with
the work others do; I need to be able to deliver feature FOO without
also delivering the incomplete feature BAR. And so on.

/Jorgen