Hacker News Reader

This happened before with “real” engineering. Engineers a hundred years ago used to be proficient with slide rules and mental math and 3D assembly by hand. Products designed in that era often lasted a hundred years, like Singer sewing machines and Lada cars and 500 year old churches. Now things aren’t built like they used to be, and few people can rebuild civilization by hand like they did. But the world moves on fine!

View on HN

It's different though because for structural engineering finite element models (set up correctly) will give you a deterministic, mathematically correct answer.

In fact FEM is arguably more deterministic than the old school pen and paper methods (yield line analysis etc.) which often rely more on correct judgement of the structural engineer doing the analysis.

So I don't think the analogy quite holds

Reply on news.ycombinator.com