A house comprises many parts. A custom motorcycle has many parts. These things are designed and built to established practices, but in 99% of cases they aren't really "engineered" with calculations and formalised decision-making processes and the like.

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9rx 2 days ago | parent [-]

> A house comprises many parts. A custom motorcycle has many parts.

Hence why they are engineered. I suspect you mentioned houses because the people who build houses are often referred to as builders, but that is because the people working houses often only do work on a single component. The system as a whole is referred to as engineering, though.

> with calculations and formalised decision-making processes and the like.

You too seem to be confusing "engineering" with "professional engineering". While societies of professional engineers would like people to think that engineering is defined by mathematical and scientific rigour, that's not how anyone actually uses the term in practice. The "software engineering" label wouldn't exist if they did.

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HPsquared 2 days ago | parent [-]

There is definitely some engineering that goes on in the software world, but it's mostly construction.

	▲	hollerith 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Software development is more like drawing up the blueprints for a building than it is like working with materials made of atoms. (The analog in software to the construction phase of the creation of a physical building either does not exist or proceeds very quickly, is very unlikely to fail or be delayed and is almost completely automated.) The word "patterns" a la software patterns was taken directly from the writings of an architect of physical buildings (namely Christopher Alexander). It is not an accident that it was not taken from the work of a construction worker, not even a high-level one in charge of hiring subcontractors and of years-long billion-dollar construction projects. The most salient difference between blueprints and software artifacts is the sheer complexity of software artifacts these days (which is why there aren't organizations that employ many tens of thousands of draftsmen and architects of physical structures) but that is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind.
	▲	9rx 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		While there is construction involved in software, the computer does that work. There is no human analog there. The human end of software is entirely at the design level, which is the defining characteristic of engineering — so long as it is a system being designed, of course, which virtually all software is.