The Problem With Software: Why Smart Engineers Write Bad Code (The MIT Press)

by Adam Barr

When designing hardware, a company is doing “real” engineering: electrical engineering has built-up knowledge about circuit design, heat dissipation and power, and other topics that can’t be solved with a “this worked for me last time” approach. Companies have to rely on research, both from academia and industry. In addition, you can’t easily make changes late in the design of hardware the way you can with software; up-front design is worth the time. Presumably a hardware company would approach a software problem with the same disciplined approach. Given that, it is understandable that early software engineering, driven by a combination of mathematicians in academia and hardware companies in industry, started down the path taken by other engineering disciplines, and you can see the results of this in the literature produced during that time. An observer in 1975 would have had reasonable confidence that the trend would continue, and that in a few decades, things would be figured out, codified, and then taught to students and reinforced through professional training. That is not the way it turned out, to put it mildly. What happened?

This is a really good point and is one of the core questions the book tries to answer -- I wish the author had put this point up early; it would have helped motivate some of the biographical material that otherwise appears self-indulgent.