On 30/09/2006, at 6:15 AM, Nicolas Frisby wrote:
Software engineering is as of yet misnamed. A professional engineer's design work should never include figuring out why the first attempt exploded/collapsed/failed--professionals in mature engineering fields only debug catastrophes.
That is only the case when engineers are performing pure development. When they are involved in research, engineers first attempts routinely explode/collapse/fail. Building a house, bridge, refinery, family car, etc, stopped being research a long time ago. However F1 racing cars, and interplanetary autonomous vehicles are. Software Engineering is so new a discipline that we still don't know how to render any but the most trivial of problems 'pure design'.
My intended takeaway is that design in software engineering does not yet compare to design in the mature engineering fields. In my engineering-centric opinion, the goal of computer science is to enrich the design principles of software engineering so that it does compare.
I couldn't agree more. So I'm going to quote the passage from Robert
Dockins that you objected to.
On 29/09/06, Robert Dockins
In a similar way, if a someone refuses or is unable to learn the mathematical foundations of computation, I don't think I really want him programming any systems that I'm going to be relying on. He don't need to be an expert in category theory, but if programmers aren't learning the skills they need to understand the basics and mathematical notation of PL theory, then something is very, very wrong. (Not to beat you over the head with my point, but what I'm saying is that programmers really ought to know this stuff and the fact that most do not is a terrible state of affairs).
Of course we will have hobbyist programmers, in much the same way we have home handymen or backyard mechanics. However anyone claiming to be a professional programmer has to deal with everything they do not being pure design, but containing a non-trivial element of research. For that reason I have to agree with Robert. I too am very concerned at the number of programmers writing code that I rely on who don't have a basic understanding of the mathematical foundations of what they do. Andrae -- Andrae Muys andrae@netymon.com Principal Mulgara Consultant Netymon Pty Ltd