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From: aland@servio.slc.com (Alan Darlington)
Subject: Engineering Exact Science?  [was Re: Theory and Practice ...
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Date: Sun, 9 Jul 1995 21:58:59 GMT
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khathi@ee.net (Kamal Hathi) writes:
<snip> 
> Software *Engineering* unfortunately is a gross misnomer. I am an 
> Electrical Engineer by education (undergraduate) and also have 
> training (post-graduate education and other) and experience as a
> "Software Engineer". One thing I can categorically state is that 
> developing software and the education in that field is closer to
> art or language (as in english) than Engineering. Engineering is
> an *exact science*, with a certain degree of inexact creative
> license thrown in for good measure. Software Engineering is 
> mostly a set of inexact and flexible *techniques* with some 
> exactness thrown in.
<snip>

I believe that you can call engineering an exact science only
because most traditional engineers (mechanical, electrical, etc.)
are reusing work that has already been done, such as designing
the 1,000th interstate freeway bridge.  The rough equivalent of
this in software engineering is copying a program from one
floppy to another to duplicate it...  :-)

To see how traditional engineers do on leading edge projects,
consider the Alaskan pipeline (years late and a factor of 10
over budget), nuclear power plants, space shuttle, etc.  These
are much more equivalent to the daily work of software
engineers, and tend to show the same lack of exactness.  :-(

(I will concede that many software engineers are reinventing
the wheel, but this is a different story...)

  -- Alan
