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I think one of the issues is that software engineers are building on sand. Civil engineers have Newton and Einstein to fall back on.

It feels like there is no ground truth in computing, each layer has to assume the layer below is generating random errors and try to account for that, because humans are not perfect.

The laws of physics stay the same, technology is constantly changing.

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When you get trained as a Chartered Engineer/Surveyor/Accountant/Purchaser etc you get schooled in ethics, professionalism, whistle blowing, how to deal with being unfairly pressurised etc. Never mind Newton, professional standards would have really helped here.

yes, and instead of numerical values that can be corrected with straightforward mathematical techniques, you have contracts (API) that are either broken or not, and theres nothing you can do about it, i mean unless you want to write thousands of extra lines of code to account for every combination of the lower layer misbehaving

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