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Comment by xmcqdpt2 | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, coding is a craft. As software has only existed for like 70 years, we are more like the guilds building cathedrals in the middle ages than like modern civil engineering.

One day I think there will be true software engineering. When that happens you won't be able to start software projects without certifications, and most people (or programs!) who actually do the coding will be following careful plans and instructions from the engineers who designed the project.

I for one am very happy software isn't fully professionalized yet!

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> One day I think there will be true software engineering. When that happens you won't be able to start software projects without certifications, and most people (or programs!) who actually do the coding will be following careful plans and instructions from the engineers who designed the project.

Sounds really bad.

Software can't fall on your head and kill you, not all of it at least.

Different software should require different professionals building it.

And it's usually not about the software but about the management telling the engineers to take shortcuts or whatever (Boeing comes to mind)

You might enjoy this article on the Therac-25 [1]. It's kind of the standard example of how errors in software can wind up harming people. I have written medical device software for about 30 years. In my experience, delivering high quality software for Class B and Class C devices is both challenging and expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Every software developer should know this story, it is a humbling and important lesson. Yes luckily most of can’t ship code that accidentally kills people but we can absolutely empathize with the conditions which led to it happening.

I recommend reading the entire postmortem, http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf yes it is quite long but if you write code in any capacity it’s worth the read

Thank you so much for the link to the postmortem. I will be sharing it and discussing it with my colleagues. We are currently working on the embedded software for an AED.

You will need a software engineer to argue in your favor before the court ;)

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