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

Drawing Sierpinski's Triangle in Minecraft Using Python

In his keynote at PyCon, Eben Upton, the Executive Director of the Rasberry Pi Foundation, mentioned that not only has Minecraft been ported to the Rasberry Pi, but you can even control it with Python. Since four of my kids are avid Minecraft fans, I figured this might be a good time to teach them to program using Python. So I started yesterday with the goal of programming something cool for Minecraft and then showing it off at the San Francisco Python Meetup in the evening.

The first problem that I faced was that I didn't have a Rasberry Pi. You can't hack Minecraft by just installing the Minecraft client. Speaking of which, I didn't have the Minecraft client installed either ;) My kids always play it on their Nexus 7s. I found an open source Minecraft server called Bukkit that "provides the means to extend the popular Minecraft multiplayer server." Then I found a plugin called RaspberryJuice that implements a subset of the Minecraft Pi modding API for Bukkit s…
4 comments
Read more

Apple: iPad and Emacs

Someone asked my boss's buddy Art Medlar if he was going to buy an iPad. He said, "I figure as soon as it runs Emacs, that will be the sign to buy." I think he was just trying to be funny, but his statement is actually fairly profound.

It's well known that submitting iPhone and iPad applications for sale on Apple's store is a huge pain--even if they're free and open source. Apple is acting as a gatekeeper for what is and isn't allowed on your device. I heard that Apple would never allow a scripting language to be installed on your iPad because it would allow end users to run code that they hadn't verified. (I don't have a reference for this, but if you do, please post it below.) Emacs is mostly written in Emacs Lisp. Per Apple's policy, I don't think it'll ever be possible to run Emacs on the iPad.

Emacs was written by Richard Stallman, and it practically defines the Free Software movement (in a manner of speaking at least). Stal…
17 comments
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." I bet it&…
50 comments
Read more