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Comment by varjag | Hacker News Reader

> To me sounds like the civil engineers started behaving more like software engineers.

Things like these were common in construction before software engineering was a thing. It always makes me chuckle when someone defers to "if we built buildings like we build software" trope. We do, and worse.

Lots of constructions standing around the world are not up to the codes in zillion different ways. They are still standing because redundant nature of physical construction is more forgiving than execution on a Turing machine.

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> Things like these were common in construction before software engineering was a thing

I read in an architect's memoirs that when he was a student back in the 1940s whenever his Architecture faculty teacher and his students visited a construction site to maybe change some small details (or at least they were perceived as "small" by said architects) oftentimes they were met with very angry construction site workers who would make the above architects think again about trying to force the implementation of those small changes. A similar story was told to me by my father (also a civil engineer) as happening in the 1980s, though the level of implied violence coming from the construction workers was a little more subdued. Wish that we in the software industry would be like those construction workers from time to time.

You have the metaphor wrong. You're the software engineer. Your toolset is the angry (or not) construction worker. Build a toolset that yells at you when you want to do something stupid/dangerous.

Interestingly, the mindset of the people who develop software toolsets (and operating systems like Unix) is exactly the opposite.

.. a type checker?

> Build a toolset that yells at you when you want to do something stupid/dangerous.

Why do you think I'm a fan of Ada? (And looking to get into VHDL, too.)

> Wish that we in the software industry would be like those construction workers from time to time.

A cluster of burly construction workers holding spanners is probably more physically intimidating than whatever we software developers could typically muster.

What if I made the caffe latte really really hot before brandishing it?

We need to form unions. That would spark the change in culture and physical fitness we need to throw our weight around.

Please no. If I had to be unionized, I'd change professions.

A friend who worked in construction in NY city told me a story of how, on a project, they had one section of rebar sitting on the ground. When the construction inspector came to inspect the site, they would put the piece of rebar near where they were pouring concrete to give the impression that they were forming the concrete with rebar in it. They were not (I presume to save time and/or money).

We have that 12-story municipality building here, standing since 1970s. An inspection last year has found it doesn't have even half of rebar necessary in the pillars, so they had to evacuate it.

> They are still standing because redundant nature of physical construction is more forgiving than execution on a Turing machine.

Joke's on you, 100% of my code is redundant.

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