Glenn Vanderburg of LivingSocial on why software development is an engineering discipline
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended in debates over whether software is real engineering, as a well-argued case that building is cheap relative to simulating.
What it is
Glenn Vanderburg argues at the O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference that software development is an engineering discipline, even if immature. He contends the discredited body of knowledge called software engineering has led people to wrongly reject the label.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2015 to 2018.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec jdiaz5513 · 2018-01 · on “Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview”
Careful. Software engineering is very much a real engineering discipline, and it is a major cultural failing to not recognize it as such. Required viewing: [this video]
Recommends rb2k_ · 2015-06 · on “Why Software Engineering Isn’t Engineering”
I don't have a particular dog in this fight, but I thought this is interesting: The last O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference had a talk by Glenn Vanderburg titled "why software development is an engineering discipline": [this video] I think the author of the blogpost does a lot of the things discussed in the talk (e.g. comparing it mostly to civil engineering as opposed to all the other engineering disciplines).
Cites mpweiher · 2017-08 · on “Software Engineering ≠ Computer Science (2009)”
Actually, it is fundamentally different in that just building the thing / just running the experiment is cheaper than doing the simulations or proofs. Every other discipline does simulations because actually running the experiment is magnitudes more expensive and time consuming. See "Why software development is an engineering discipline" [this video]