From a talk by E.W. Dijkstra about the difficulties behind computer science as a discipline.A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot.".
The popularity of its name is enough to make it suspect. In what we denote as "primitive societies", the superstition that knowing someone's true name gives you magic power over him is not unusual. We are hardly less primitive: why do we persist here in answering the telephone with the most unhelpful "hello" instead of our name?
Nor are we above the equally primitive superstition that we can gain some control over some unknown, malicious demon by calling it by a safe, familiar, and innocent name, such as "engineering". But it is totally symbolic, as one of the US computer manufacturers proved a few years ago when it hired, one night, hundreds of new "software engineers" by the simple device of elevating all its programmers to that exalting rank. So much for that term.
Hello, my name is Gregory Brown. I am the founder of Mendicant University, a free online school for software developers.
I am passionate about community service, education, and the free software movement. If you're interested in getting to know me a bit better, feel free to send me an email: gregory.t.brown@gmail.com
