Skip to main content

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
Labels:

Comments

Unknown said…
Except that a Software Engineer should be able to intelligently discuss physics with a Physicist, to such a level that the two could work together to implement the software for a physics problem.

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.
11:12 AM
jjinux said…
I read "Professional Software Engineering", so I am familiar with what you are saying.

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.
11:32 AM
Unknown said…
And that of course is why Software Engineering is so difficult :) But someone saying that "Software Engineering" is an oxymoron just because it's not based around physics seems... old fashioned.

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.
11:56 AM
sigfpe said…
Software engineering is called 'engineering' because it has some analogies with other forms of engineering. But there's no reason to believe that different forms of engineering are literally isomorphic so that a feature of one is or should be present in some form in the other.
3:45 PM
Anonymous said…
Engineering started with only basic understanding of gross material behavior. There was certainly very little material science or knowledge of physics.

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.
4:46 PM
jjinux said…
Chui Tey, very well spoken.
11:16 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ubuntu 20.04 on a 2015 15" MacBook Pro

I decided to give Ubuntu 20.04 a try on my 2015 15" MacBook Pro. I didn't actually install it; I just live booted from a USB thumb drive which was enough to try out everything I wanted. In summary, it's not perfect, and issues with my camera would prevent me from switching, but given the right hardware, I think it's a really viable option. The first thing I wanted to try was what would happen if I plugged in a non-HiDPI screen given that my laptop has a HiDPI screen. Without sub-pixel scaling, whatever scale rate I picked for one screen would apply to the other. However, once I turned on sub-pixel scaling, I was able to pick different scale rates for the internal and external displays. That looked ok. I tried plugging in and unplugging multiple times, and it didn't crash. I doubt it'd work with my Thunderbolt display at work, but it worked fine for my HDMI displays at home. I even plugged it into my TV, and it stuck to the 100% scaling I picked for the othe
1 comment
Read more

ERNOS: Erlang Networked Operating System

I've been reading Dreaming in Code lately, and I really like it. If you're not a dreamer, you may safely skip the rest of this post ;) In Chapter 10, "Engineers and Artists", Alan Kay, John Backus, and Jaron Lanier really got me thinking. I've also been thinking a lot about Minix 3 , Erlang , and the original Lisp machine . The ideas are beginning to synthesize into something cohesive--more than just the sum of their parts. Now, I'm sure that many of these ideas have already been envisioned within Tunes.org , LLVM , Microsoft's Singularity project, or in some other place that I haven't managed to discover or fully read, but I'm going to blog them anyway. Rather than wax philosophical, let me just dump out some ideas: Start with Minix 3. It's a new microkernel, and it's meant for real use, unlike the original Minix. "This new OS is extremely small, with the part that runs in kernel mode under 4000 lines of executable code.&quo
50 comments
Read more

Haskell or Erlang?

I've coded in both Erlang and Haskell. Erlang is practical, efficient, and useful. It's got a wonderful niche in the distributed world, and it has some real success stories such as CouchDB and jabber.org. Haskell is elegant and beautiful. It's been successful in various programming language competitions. I have some experience in both, but I'm thinking it's time to really commit to learning one of them on a professional level. They both have good books out now, and it's probably time I read one of those books cover to cover. My question is which? Back in 2000, Perl had established a real niche for systems administration, CGI, and text processing. The syntax wasn't exactly beautiful (unless you're into that sort of thing), but it was popular and mature. Python hadn't really become popular, nor did it really have a strong niche (at least as far as I could see). I went with Python because of its elegance, but since then, I've coded both p
66 comments
Read more