Is software engineering, well, engineering?

[jimbob]

First you should look at Uber for their "provide a taxi service" attempts and see if they can do that safely and without damaging effects.

Ha true.

But their self-driving car attempts were possibly even more obviously reckless, if you're comparing them to slightly-iffy minicab firms.

[dyqik]

First you should look at Uber for their "provide a taxi service" attempts and see if they can do that safely and without damaging effects.

Ha true.

But their self-driving car attempts were possibly even more obviously reckless, if you're comparing them to slightly-iffy minicab firms.

It's not just the passenger safety, but the use of massively leveraged borrowing and venture capital to displace existing companies, despite having no real business advantage except evasion of employment and taxi hire regulations.

[jimbob]

First you should look at Uber for their "provide a taxi service" attempts and see if they can do that safely and without damaging effects.

Ha true.

But their self-driving car attempts were possibly even more obviously reckless, if you're comparing them to slightly-iffy minicab firms.

It's not just the passenger safety, but the use of massively leveraged borrowing and venture capital to displace existing companies, despite having no real business advantage except evasion of employment and taxi hire regulations.

Fintech

[plodder]

wrt to silicon valley, following this guy on twitter gives me great joy:

https://www.profgalloway.com/

[bjn]

First you should look at Uber for their "provide a taxi service" attempts and see if they can do that safely and without damaging effects.

Ha true.

But their self-driving car attempts were possibly even more obviously reckless, if you're comparing them to slightly-iffy minicab firms.

It's not just the passenger safety, but the use of massively leveraged borrowing and venture capital to displace existing companies, despite having no real business advantage except evasion of employment and taxi hire regulations.

That's not so much software and programming per-se, but a certain predatory form of capitalism. Uber isn't a technology company, it's a cab company that tries to avoid regulations by pretending not to be one. Uber was enabled by a smartphone app, but fundamentally what it does is sells cab rides not software. It's no more a software company than my local mini-cab firm is a telecoms company because they use phones. Similarly with We Work etc...

[bjn]

wrt to silicon valley, following this guy on twitter gives me great joy:

https://www.profgalloway.com/

Hi WeWork takedowns are genius.

[plodder]

wrt to silicon valley, following this guy on twitter gives me great joy:

https://www.profgalloway.com/

Hi WeWork takedowns are genius.

Yes. Yogababble is an amazing modern insult.

[sheldrake]

Fintech is not always about dodging around taxes and regulations. Sometimes they're just doing much more efficient internet-only versions of perfectly legit existing services, e.g. TransferWise. Mainstream financial services companies can be horrifically inefficient.

[Imrael]

I think theres a pretty hopeless definition problem here. For background I spent a lot of years as an actual coder but now have a more managery function in a related team, but have watched our software team develop over many years.

For pretty mundane commercial software, the overall process is now quite engineery - reviewed designs, coding standards, automatic and manual testing, tools-based deployments and installations etc. The reason for this isnt some drive for quality for its own sake, but to improve predictablity of outcomes (and the realisation that fixing a bug the week that its written is hugely cheaper than fixing it after customer release).

What we've ended up with an overall process that looks a lot like "proper" engineering but rather few individuals who look like engineers. As far as I can tell this is pretty commonplace now - development shops have a mix of skills (although everyone is a decent communicator and able to understand overall requirements, which rather goes against another common stereotype)

[bmforre]

I have referred to this thread on the thread re "Starliner flies to wrong orbit" where a software mixup now looks like the likely source of error and people ask why this wasn't caught during design and testing.

[sheldrake]

Trying to design out all the errors from a complex piece of software is pretty hard. I don't think people fully appreciate the complexity of even simple-looking things like, say, Twitter, or your online banking website.

[plodder]

Is there a do \ check \ review sign- off process for each element of work? That's a good starting point.

[sheldrake]

Is there a do \ check \ review sign- off process for each element of work? That's a good starting point.

In a well run place, yes. However, the complexity of modern software is such that the checklists never cover every possibility because there's a kind of cartesian explosion of different permutations as the elements interact with each other.

A single line of code might do something like 'look in the two memory locations pointed to by these numbers, add together what you find there and compare the result to this constant MAXIMUM_NUMBER. If the result is bigger than MAXIMUM_NUMBER then send this error signal to every other subsystem that might be listening for it.

Your Windows operating system has about 50 million lines of code, all interacting with each other like that, for example.

Twitter looks like a fairly simple thing, but last time I looked they had over 1000 engineers working on it. Google has more like 20,000 engineers. ('Engineers' in the case of companies like this will mean people with postgrad degrees in maths, electrical engineering and/or computer science in a lot of cases)

[sheldrake]

Another thing to consider is that correctness and durability aren't the most important thing to optimise for all in all situations. Appraching a mobile phone game funded by ads in the same as writing some critical piece of code for a plane or nuclear reactor would be very bad engineering; you'd waste a lot of time and money when it wasn't worth it. Different tools for different jobs.

[plodder]

If you want to call writing a game engineering, then I hope you'll also embrace the engineering that went into writing & producing the Gavin and Stacey Christmas Special. One line out of place and the whole thing would have fallen down.

[sheldrake]

If you want to call writing a game engineering, then I hope you'll also embrace the engineering that went into writing & producing the Gavin and Stacey Christmas Special. One line out of place and the whole thing would have fallen down.

Writing games is engineering & art.

The Gavin and Stacey Christmas special performed by robots would be engineering.

[Imrael]

Well, if you want to go with the analogy thing, your TV program will take place ina building and use a bunch of equipment that is by most definitions engineered. Quite a lot of software too.

Most games are built on some kind of framework or platform, which has many of the attribuites of engineered things - designed and built to a process, testable, repeatable etc etc.

On top of that in both cases "creatives" script words, movement, action, scenery and lighting. There may be voice actors in some games (though probably not in a mobile phone one).

Because there no definition of an "engineered" item the analogy can be stretched as far as anyone fancies.

[sheldrake]

Well, if you want to go with the analogy thing, your TV program will take place ina building and use a bunch of equipment that is by most definitions engineered. Quite a lot of software too.

Most games are built on some kind of framework or platform, which has many of the attribuites of engineered things - designed and built to a process, testable, repeatable etc etc.

On top of that in both cases "creatives" script words, movement, action, scenery and lighting. There may be voice actors in some games (though probably not in a mobile phone one).

Because there no definition of an "engineered" item the analogy can be stretched as far as anyone fancies.

not really.

[greyspoke]

If you want to call writing a game engineering, then I hope you'll also embrace the engineering that went into writing & producing the Gavin and Stacey Christmas Special. One line out of place and the whole thing would have fallen down.

Writing games is engineering & art.

The Gavin and Stacey Christmas special performed by robots would be engineering.

I agree that games (most creative products really) require artistic and technical creativity to get the final product out there. The final product is never a single thing, it is lots of things put together. When the final product looks like a single thing, that is because all the folk involved did their jobs and worked together well. "Ars adeat laetet arte sua". (That is from memory, did I get it right? Ovid was it?)

But Gavin etc. would only be just engineering if a robot wrote the script, designed the sets, chose the costumes etc. Recognition of the potential for artistic interpretation and technical innovation by AIs is shaping up to be the next big thing in intellectual property law (what I used to work in).

ETA "ars adeo laetet arte sua" was the quote I think.

[plodder]

No, you've missed the analogy. Sheldrake claims that putting together a tricky complex thing with lots of moving and interrelated parts is engineering. That makes scriptwriting engineering.

[sheldrake]

Sheldrake claims that putting together a tricky complex thing with lots of moving and interrelated parts is engineering.

No, I didn't say that was engineering in and of itself. It's just that the large number of moving interrelated parts makes it hard to get right.

[bjn]

If you want to call writing a game engineering, then I hope you'll also embrace the engineering that went into writing & producing the Gavin and Stacey Christmas Special. One line out of place and the whole thing would have fallen down.

So no one was involved in making the switching gear, the cameras, the recording equipment or the software to drive those systems for Gavin and Stacey?

Damn straight computer games involve software engineering as well as non technical aspects.

[Woodchopper]

Dudes, engineering is using science to make things.

There are other ways to make complex things - eg intuition, tradition, trial and error.

If a game is built using scientific principles then I don’t mind calling it engineering.

But I expect that a TV script doesn’t involve a lot of science.

[dyqik]

Dudes, engineering is using science to make things.

There are other ways to make complex things - eg intuition, tradition, trial and error.

If a game is built using scientific principles then I don’t mind calling it engineering.

But I expect that a TV script doesn’t involve a lot of science.

Producing a TV show does though. We even have some broadcast engineers on this forum.

[plodder]

Writing software is closer to screenwriting than camera design though.

Computer design is engineering, and I'm sure some software design requires deep knowledge of the physics of computers, but mostly software writing is a combination of arithmetic and the sort of creative writing that results in, say, a Haynes manual or a news bulletin.