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Comment by einherjae | Hacker News Reader

But all you’re saying boils down to the best practices being questionable, not that actually formalizing them into a proper craftsmanship wouldn’t make sense if we actually made better best practices.

You may talk about gatekeeping all day, but at the end of the day we do want the code in our pacemakers, cars and drones to be written by people following stringent standards, such that we have some idea of the quality.

The fact that said standards may not yet exist is not an argument against that, it’s an argument against the status quo in standards.

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The issue with standards is that they only capture a very, very small part of the problem.

Let‘s look at the results: NASA probably uses some of the most rigorous development and testing methods in the world, but I‘d still rather trust my life to the flight control software of SpaceX who doesn‘t give a damn about education.

The banks losing data mentioned by OP are way more rigid in their hiring and certification standards than a Stripe for example. Who would you rather trust on security?

My point is: I’m all for better code, but Culture trumps certification and standards every single time.

> NASA probably uses some of the most rigorous development and testing methods in the world, but I‘d still rather trust my life to the flight control software of SpaceX who doesn‘t give a damn about education.

Why? Have there been any NASA manned accidents that were caused by software? There's certainly been big historical bloopers in the past involving unmanned probes, like getting metric and imperial mixed up, but doubtless NASA software quality is better now. And what is your basis that SpaceX doesn't care about education, while NASA does? Are you a hiring manager at either?

> The banks losing data mentioned by OP are way more rigid in their hiring and certification standards than a Stripe for example. Who would you rather trust on security?

Is that true that banks are more rigid in those standards? Or Stripe is more lax?

There are only three deadly incidents to choose from, thankfully, and it happens they were caused by other kinds of (presumably licensed) engineers. Software incidents include a flight computer failure during the landing of Apollo 11. Another incident caused reset of their navigation computer, requiring them to recalibrate it using a tangible sextant. If we go a little beyond literal NASA, it’s not hard to find computer failures. Aside from the infamous 737 Max, we have the loss of a B-2 on takeoff, which costs the same as a space shuttle. (Thankfully the pilots ejected.) Then the famous story of the Patriot missiles’ first deployment. If I actually Google this, will I find no more?

If we're just talking about aerospace at this point, hasn't the F-35 flight software been notoriously buggy

> Software incidents include a flight computer failure during the landing of Apollo 11.

How did flight computer fail during Apollo 11 landing? If you mean guidance computer and famous 1201 and 1202 errors, those were not failures, but were caused by hardware bug they left unsolved on purpose.

That's your choice, but in a space mission or in a self-driving car I'd rather not be a casualty of move fast and break things.

> not that actually formalizing them into a proper craftsmanship wouldn’t make sense if we actually made better best practices.

This is the start of a bureaucracy that will grind progress to a halt. Because now instead of solving problems we get to create a commission who can appoint a club that have the right to appoint the master craftsmen who will be capable enough to formalize best practices.

If you think that's hyperbole on how this stuff works, it is not.

Furthermore, why would we assume people who enjoy debating best practices know actual master craftsmen?

> The fact that said standards may not yet exist is not an argument against that, it’s an argument against the status quo in standards.

The fact that said standards have been tried, and you don't know about them is a very strong argument against them.

> This is the start of a bureaucracy that will grind progress to a halt. Because now instead of solving problems we get to create a commission who can appoint a club that have the right to appoint the master craftsmen who will be capable enough to formalize best practices.

This bureaucracy already exists, across myriads of RFCs, language design committees, FOSS groups, GitHub issues, Gitter servers, listservs. This process already exists, it just bumbles along inconsistently from community to community, company to company, project to project. And perhaps it should, because no size fits all. But it does exist and any attempt at formalizing them would not cause the start of a bureaucracy to exist, because such bureaucracies are in abundance in software development already.

If you define a bureaucracy making best practices so broadly as to capture GitHub issues, then the term becomes meaningless.

The sense the OP is trying to argue for (rather unsuccessfully) is a government bureaucracy that forbids people from deviating from those best practices. This is "serious", you see, whereas a competitive market of ideas leading to the organic development of best practices (what we have now) is "trivial".

The problem with that idea is that although it pleases people who associate government control with seriousness, the evidence it actually leads to better outcomes is mixed at best, and negative at worst. Regulatory capture is a real problem in many industries, and the attempt to fix things with regulated "best practices" can often be short term hacks that also inconveniently render more robust long term fixes illegal (finance has a lot of problems like this).

In the software world you can look at things like MISRA-C or FIPS to get a taste of what everything would look like if we don't keep systematically pushing back against these misguided people.

I don’t think government control is necessary. Much of what the OP is talking about can be undertaken by industry standards, or just by enough software engineers and software firms agreeing upon it, whether through a body like an IEEE or unofficially like how Agile spread in popularity.

We agree then! But the article author disagrees:

"Software practitioners should be licensed and be bound by a professional ethical code where violation of said code would result in the revocation of the license to practice software engineering."

The article very clearly argues for government control of who can be a programmer or not (who is doing the revoking, otherwise). That would be destructive, fatal to innovation and totally counterproductive.

Sure, though this discussion doesn't have to be limited to the OP's constraints.

> better best practices

Really? No, seriously, where will this end? Now we need better BEST practices?

I mean. This "best practices" wagon is just a nonsense. My impression is some people don't want the burden of thinking, so they want something to memorize. And blame when things go wrong - which they inevitably will, as in any and all "crafts" and "professions".

Engineering, medicine, etc, are all full of examples of failures. Is this evidence they should get rid of certifications and all bureaucracy? No.

Is software failures an evidence we should have more bureaucracy? No, it's evidence we need to think more and memorize less.

Then perhaps the best practices shouldn't be rules for rote memorization, but better approaches towards thinking and reasoning about code. Maybe this field could use more discipline in how it approaches not just creating code but reading code. What is the use of thinking if it's not guided by methodology? Didn't many of us study computer science?

Programming science does not exist.

And yet, programming claims to be guided by computer science.

Universities claim programming is guided by computer science, because they love sticking the label "science" on non-scientific things.

The average working programmer probably doesn't care whether their work is considered a science or not. Certainly I feel like the ROI on reading CS papers in my own career has been quite low. They have a habit of sounding useful and impactful until you finish reading them and realize there's a pretty major catch. I have a degree named "computer science" but it's questionable whether it was really scientific, given that science is usually defined as a study of the natural world. There's nothing natural about computer programming, outside of perhaps complexity theory. You could argue that maybe at the edges deep learning is blurring into a study of naturalistic phenomena, but you have to be careful, otherwise you reclassify pure maths as a science and I think everyone agrees that it's a separate thing.

Computer science is only vaguely related to programming, in roughly the same way that the travelling salesman problem is related to actually travelling salesmen.

(I personally hold that there are only three CS courses relevant to daily programmer life: graph theory, complexity analysis and state machines. Everything else is at best situational.)

But in practice, "best practices" are always set by some sort of stagnant bureaucracy, often some sort of quasi-union organization that demands fees and spends all its time trying to keep newcomers out of the profession in order to protect the salaries of those already inside it. Worse still, it can lead to dysfunctional behavior industry-wide that has no competitive path to fixing it.

Look at what's happened to medicine. Huge numbers of people have had their confidence in doctors seriously damaged over the past 2 years because they keep saying things that are patently nonsense, like "oh your period vanished for 5 months immediately after taking a vaccine, it must be a coincidence" (this happened to a friend of ours). Why do they say these things, well, because if they go against the party line on vaccine injuries they can lose their license:

https://trialsitenews.com/doctors-sanctioned-for-speaking-ou...

That sort of action has nothing to do with best practices and everything to do with power structures. The software equivalent would be something like, "if you imply Java is not the best language to build enterprise software in, you could lose your license" or "if you write forum software that doesn't run every post through this officially approved AI for misinformation, you can lose your license". It doesn't look like bugs magically disappearing. I'd expect the rate of bugs to go up, actually, as standards ossified and became irrelevant (see: FIPS).

What stagnant bureaucracy instituted Agile across the industry, or mandated the widespread adoption of Node, or React, or any hot trending technology of the decade? Ad hoc best practices or chosen tools get picked up all the time without a power structure demanding it.

Maybe the compromise isn’t to institute formal licensing, but rather pay more attention to and give more support to industry bodies such as the ACM/IEEE.

Best practices come as an accepted way of doing things. It means not reinventing the wheel for every project.

Of course best practices can only work for problems that have already been solved. There are plenty of problems that need innovative thinking and unorthodox practices. The more brain power you can dedicate to solving those problems, the better.

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