Comment by hgomersall
Comment by hgomersall 4 days ago
Engineering is just about wielding tools to solve problems. You don't need to use formal methods to do engineering in general. Sometimes they're useful; sometimes they're required; often they just get in the way.
In the context of software vs other sub-disciplines, the big difference is in the cost of iterating and validating. A bridge has very high iteration cost (generally, it must be right first time) and validation is proven over decades. Software has very low iteration cost, so it makes much more sense to do that over lots of upfront design. Validation of software can also generally be implemented through software tools, since it's comparatively easy to simulate the running environment of the software.
Other disciplines like electronics live a little closer to a bridge, but it's still relatively cheap to iterate, so you tend to plan interim design iterations to prove out various aspects.
"In the context of software vs other sub-disciplines, the big difference is in the cost of iterating and validating."
People forget that software is used in those other disciplines. CFD, FEA, model-based design etc. help to verify ideas and design without building any physical prototype and burning money in the real lab.
You can do some strain and stress analysis on a virtual bridge to get a high degree of confidence that the real bridge will perform fine. Of course, then you need to validate it at all stages of development, and at the end perform final validation under weight.
The thing is that people building engines, cars, planes, sensors, PCBs and bridges actually do so, largely because they are required to do so. If you give them freedom to not do that, many of them will spare themselves such effort. And they understand the principles of things they are working on. No one requires any of that from someone that glued together few NPM packages with a huge JS front-end framework, and such person may not even know anything about how the HTTP works, how browser handles the DOM etc. It's like having a mechanical engineer that doesn't even understand basic principles of dynamics.
There are industries that deal with the software (i.e. controls design) that have much higher degree of quality assurance and more validation tools, including meaningful quantitative criteria, so it clearly is not a matter of software vs hardware.