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0 pointsziggus4y ago0 comments

Maybe in your experience that conflation makes sense, but a developer is not necessarily a software engineer.

There are distinct educational programs that differ between "computer science" and "software engineering", and a number of professional organizations are lobbying for software engineering licensure, similar to other engineering professions.

Even Dijkstra knew of the differentation: '"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."'

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spmurrayzzz4y ago

I'm glad you brought up Dijkstra. He's famous (amongst many other things) for coining the phrase/concept "separation of concerns". He considered this to be a fundamental principle in software engineering, giving the field of programming more structure as you allude to in your comment.

But that SoC concept is fairly endemic in a field of folks who self-identify as "developers". The MVC/MVVM craze of the late 2000s and early 2010s had this plastered on every blog. You can call the self-identification mismatch a taxonomy issue, but my original comment is trying to deduce why that distinction matters at all in practice if developers are embracing concepts that we would consider "proper" software engineering.

I suspect the distinction is just noise at this point.

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