Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "Software Craftsmanship vs Software Engineering" video.

  1. I think of software design as a parallel to architecture. It has merged with art a bit, and heavy on engineering. There are objectively "good" buildings and "bad" buildings, but over the centuries, we have come to understand that poorly designed buildings fall down and kill people, a lot of them. Software today is divided into life critical applications and non-life critical applications. I have worked on both (medical applications). The problem is that there is not enough recognition that software projects fall down. Our complexity is simply out of control, and many projects end when the software has too many bugs and not enough understanding. Programmers move on; the code was not that well understood to begin with. Most software isn't designed to be read. Printed out, its only useful in the toilet, which dovetails nicely with today's idea that software should not be printed. In the old days (1960s era), it was common to keep programs in printed form, usually annotated by the keeper. If I dare to suggest that a given bit of code is ugly, I am told that nobody is ever going to look at it, and it is going to be discarded shortly in any case. If we are engineers, we are a funny bit. Electronic engineers don't produce schematics that are messes of spaghetti without much (or any) annotation. Same with mechanical engineers, or (say) architects. I'd like to say that software is a new science, and we are going to evolve out of this phase, but I don't think I will see it in my lifetime.
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