> "How many centuries did it take for civil engineering, for example, to become the codified, standardized, and respected calling it is now?"

But the software industry is not starting from centuries ago. We have the benefit of modern education and literacy rates, instantaneous global communication, centuries of experience and data in other life and safety critical fields to draw on to understand how to establish a reasonable level of safety in the face of uncertainty, vast libraries of knowledge and data that can be called upon online, and nearly a century of increasing regulation and professionalization in those fields. Sorry but that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.