The first half is this essay asserts that software engineering is like a science because "software development is actually full of discovery" and not the "engineering practice of combining and assembling what is available from the complex system of computing in order to manifest a given vision."
This is extremely poor understanding. All engineering is full of discovery. Electrical engineers are constantly discovering new circuits that do the same task but with different resource usages and performance trade-offs. Civil engineers are doing the same thing with buildings. etc.
> Software development has the benefit of relying on abstraction layers....
So does every other engineering discipline. You think every new machine is built from first principles?
> Computing is so complex that these interfaces are never perfectly clean...
Author seems to imply that this is something unique to computing. Probably because they have never tried to build a complex analog circuit by assembling together a bunch of component circuits.
This is extremely poor understanding. All engineering is full of discovery. Electrical engineers are constantly discovering new circuits that do the same task but with different resource usages and performance trade-offs. Civil engineers are doing the same thing with buildings. etc.
> Software development has the benefit of relying on abstraction layers....
So does every other engineering discipline. You think every new machine is built from first principles?
> Computing is so complex that these interfaces are never perfectly clean...
Author seems to imply that this is something unique to computing. Probably because they have never tried to build a complex analog circuit by assembling together a bunch of component circuits.