Taki says...

Software Engineering is a discipline, not a science. It takes more than mild (in)competence with a sophisticated tool to be scientist.

Software Engineering is a discipline, not an alchemy. All alchemists found meddling in my chosen discipline shall be flayed to within an inch of their sorry lives and then viciously prodded until they renounce their wrongly assumed status.

Software Engineering has much to learn from the rigours of the scientific method, and science has much to heed from the mistakes of software engineering.

Them thar alchemists have been at it again.I am currently scanning through a 28-page, 2353-line source code file, approximately 20 of which lines are comments (approximately 8 of which read “I know what I’m doing!”, 9 read “Don’t change this”, and what’s left over insists that they “could do this better” (I could’ve told them that)).

Why do people bother lecturing and writing books on SE and OOD and the like? As soon as a thorny problem comes along, your (particularly) average software engineer will quickly revert to hacking (in the English style).