Interesting Links for 19-01-2021

[andrewducker]

Asking engineers what they think of software engineering

(tags:softwareengineering software engineering society regulation history viaFanf )

Are you envious of Umberto Eco's library?

(tags:library books video )

"EU needs masterplan to move financial business away from London" says largest parliamentary group

(tags:Europe UK finance Doom )

Comments

[cmcmck]

It's bigger than ours but no, because we too have a custom built library! :o)

[foms]

I have a memory of reading something from him about "no, these are just the ones I have to read by Friday - I keep the rest at the office". Probably, somewhere in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays.

Edit: How to Justify a Private Library: "No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office"

[andrewducker]

An excellent reply!

[foms]

I am encouraged. Thank you.

I have another vague memory that leads me to the idea that Eco was responding to another answer to the same question. Honoré de Balzac, maybe: Of course not. I'm collecting possibilities.

[symbioid]

Here I'm trying to downsize my library to a small shelf full.
But if anyone would have such a large library it would be him. Has anyone tracked who has the largest private libraries?

RE: Software Engineering, and perhaps this is less for software engineering then actual chip engineers. But I think the general concept applies.

Engineering in some sense is about the manipulation of flow. IDK if this has been said anywhere or if it's just something I've observed, but when I think of an engineer, whether it be airflow around a planes wing, flow of fuel in a pipeline, flow of traffic on a road, flow of air over a bridge, or the flow of electricity in a circuit...

(Obviously it's not *just* flow, and one might rather call it "forces" than flow).

But abstracting from force to flow seems prudent if one is going to consider a traffic engineer an engineer. Likewise, branching pathways of electrons and switches requires a flow study. On the hardware that much is simple to see as an engineer and flow, but moving from there to software requires another abstraction.

Code itself acts as a master controller of flow in the hardware.

I don't think it's easy to categorize a software engineer as an engineer as such. I've seen calls for regulating them as such (and I half wonder if that's what this is about). The complexity of hardware/software interaction is much much more difficult to manage than the well understood laws of classical physics.