"Other professions, like medicine, the law, and engineering, have values and a professional ethic, where certain things are valued for their own sake."
[citation needed]
I can't parse what exactly this is supposed to refer to. Doctors treat the patients they get - and frequently wind up with no choice but to use treatments that are only barely worse than the disease (see the history of chemotherapy drugs, for instance). Outside of legal academia, the legal profession is always working with imperfect information, imperfect systems, imperfect people making the calls (ffs, I feel a Law and Order episode breaking out)...
To me, the giant disconnect is that we've still got two threads of thought still mixed together under "Computer Science": the actual science-y bit, and the "shovel bits from A to B" software construction part. It's as if materials science, structural engineering, and construction management were all lumped together. Putting a new sidewalk in does not require the development of an entirely new method for making concrete.
> I can't parse what exactly this is supposed to refer to.
Oh come on. You know what he's trying to say, you're just saying he's making an over-generalization and that he's wrong. If you want to say that, say it. Don't pretend like it's so incomprehensible you can't parse the sentence.
How long did it take these three different fields to fully separate and have their own concentrations in universities? That may give us a timeline on how long it could be in the computer science, software engineering/architecture (does such a concentration exist involving architecture?), and software development methodology (project management... which is almost no existent in academia) fields.
Computer science used to be quite separate from application development and the nearest it would come to actual software was low level OS componentry. Any conglomeration is more recent.
Software is different from laying concrete. When you lay concrete, you do the same thing over and over again.
In software, on the other, we try to automate any recurring task. We are trying to stand on the shoulders of our predecessors, and in turn allow those that come after to reach even higher.
[citation needed]
I can't parse what exactly this is supposed to refer to. Doctors treat the patients they get - and frequently wind up with no choice but to use treatments that are only barely worse than the disease (see the history of chemotherapy drugs, for instance). Outside of legal academia, the legal profession is always working with imperfect information, imperfect systems, imperfect people making the calls (ffs, I feel a Law and Order episode breaking out)...
To me, the giant disconnect is that we've still got two threads of thought still mixed together under "Computer Science": the actual science-y bit, and the "shovel bits from A to B" software construction part. It's as if materials science, structural engineering, and construction management were all lumped together. Putting a new sidewalk in does not require the development of an entirely new method for making concrete.