Software Engineering: No Physics
"'Software Engineering' is something of an oxymoron," L. Peter Deutsch, a software veteran who worked at the fabled Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the seventies and eighties, has said. "It's very difficult to have real engineering before you have physics, and there isn't anything even close to a physics for software."
"Dreaming in Code" p. 276
"Dreaming in Code" p. 276
Comments
In Canada, where engineering is a professional discipline with legal backing behind it (ie. it's illegal to call yourself a professional engineer if you haven't met the correct accreditation requirements), this is a large part of Software Engineering.
Software Engineering recently became a professional engineering discipline, and while most of the focus is on formal methods, you also *have* to take multiple classes on physics, chemistry, mechanics, thermodynamics, ethics, etc.
A Software Engineer should not be an expert in any of those fields, but must be able to work with domain experts to implement a solution in software.
There are no physics laws governing software in such a way as to guarantee that the safeguards are "strong" enough to keep the software from falling over. I know if a bridge is strong enough; I don't know if a piece of software is strong enough.
It's a young field that still needs a lot of work, but you have to start somewhere. We'll probably never have a software equivalent to f=ma, but you *can* formally prove software designs. It's just really really hard.
Take a look at the invention of steam engines, they were prone to explosions, and most of the refinement came through practice, observation and refinement. I'd challenge anyone to say this is the actual process of engineering, and not very different from what software engineers do.