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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

It's not just analog tech: it's actual engineering. The hardware we have is amazing, most of our software royally sucks. But software done right is also most impressive.

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To be fair, you can do a lot when you throw a near endless supply of money at things. Definitely impressive though.

To get great software, you need a small team and give them extremely clear requirements of what it should do with an assload of extremely clear testcases.

This is a fairly generalizable rule in any engineering, unless you really are running the Apollo program (then when divide-and-conquering should probably remember this rule).

And lots of time to tune things and solve all little problems, and manually implement things when abstractions hamper performance.

The best software comes from a small team of top level devs who are also top level subject matter experts on the software’s domain. This doesn’t happen very often.

This is running into the no-code problem of clear-enough requirements being as complex as the code, via Kolmogorov.

It doesn't have to be a small team. See "They Write The Right Stuff".

And even they make mistakes, software contains much more moving parts than hardware.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/37110/what-was-the...

> Use of pointers required a written, approved, variance from the SW standards board. All the code was formally peer reviewed by at least 6 people. More complicated code would be reviewed by 20+ people - in the same room.

Wow, thats a hell of a HN thing to say.

Do you think the "software engineering" people are giving engineering a bad name?

"Christian scientists" are Christians who attach themselves to the word science because science has such a powerful reputation. In their case I'm not worried about their trickery because everyone recognizes this. Everyone knows that Christian scientists are not scientists.

With software engineering it's not as clear. It's possible to create software applying engineering principles, but that's not what 99%+ of what is called "software engineering" is. And because most people don't recognize this, I think eventually this might run off "engineering".

In case you are wondering about all those “reading rooms” you may see in various cities:

Not to be confused with Christianity and science, Christians in Science, Christians in science and technology, or Scientology.

Christian Science is a set of beliefs and practices which are associated with members of the Church of Christ, Scientist. Adherents are commonly known as Christian Scientists or students of Christian Science, and the church is sometimes informally known as the Christian Science church. It was founded in 19th-century New England by Mary Baker Eddy, . . .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science

Software is engineering.

The near entire majority of software development in the modern world is digital plumbing. Very very few organizations practice software engineering

What's ur definition of "engineering" then

Yeah, I've worked in structural engineering with real chartered professional engineers. Most of that work was relying on rules of thumb and bodging in hacks to fit around too small customer budgets, changing requirements, contractors trying to exploit loopholes, or bad designs from architects. No job ever had the budget to do anything "properly".

Software development usually seems far more controlled than that was.

If you don't know what engineering means, why not check out Wikipedia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering

I have my interpretation of "engineering" based on my degree, wiki's definition and discussions.

But people have various interpretations of that, especially those who try to act as if for some weird reasons software was not engineering and that's what I'm asking for.

Why so snarky?

You didn't read anything I wrote, did you?

I did and I think that I see the narration that's there.

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