Are programmers engineers?

s.

Well if you are a Physicist then you are clearly not an engineer. Nothing w rong with Physicists but they have their own institutions. No I am not conf using IEEE or IET with professional accreditation. In some countries you mu st be registered as an engineer or you are committing fraud. I think Canada may be one. In the UK even a dog can call themselves an engineer and so it is far better that all professionals become registered - just as doctors d o. Would you visit a doctor who had no practicing certificate?

No. Programmers are not Engineers. Professional Engineers are

Depends. I don't call myself that, but lots of other people do. Engineering is about 75% of my work--I build electro-optical and electronic gizmos for a living, many of which have advanced the state of the art considerably.

That's just the kind of nanny-state nonsense that I hate.

So you say, but you present zero arguments in support of that view.

That is a stupid comparison. A doctor has no product, so the only thing to examine is him. Engineers design and build things, and it's the _things_ that have the safety implications. So we have UL testing and so on, to make sure that nobody gets electrocuted and nothing catches fire. There's nothing like that for bridges, obviously, because they're mostly one-offs, and if one falls down, it's a writeoff.

Electronics isn't like that. There's no reason to care who designed some gizmo as long as it works and is safe. Some pretty good stuff gets designed by technicians and amateurs, and there's no reason to think that somebody with a wall full of certificates can't sometimes design dangerous junk. Everybody has an off day occasionally.

Buggy software is a nuisance, for sure. However, software is a structure of thought, not materials, and that makes it a special case. Medical devices, vehicle controls, large robots, and avionics have to be built and programmed in a safety culture. Calling somebody a Certified Programmer and then shoving him back into the usual "ship it then fix it" environment won't make things safe.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

No system is perfect, they all have flaws, but I am sure that you would sle ep better on a plane if you knew that the designers were all registered eng ineers. I would not be happy about riding across a bridge if an amateur built it. Y es it doesn't matter if my radio or TV breaks down I just send it back, but for any quality control you need to start with the right materials and man power. There is no doubt that many people can put an Arduino matched to a m otor and get it working, but I wouldn't have them designing a aircraft.

Haven't used CMS for at least a decade, maybe three, either.

However, punched tape was more of an I/O device. Cards were pretty much RO, by the computer. Sure, there were punches but you lost all of the advantages you cite above. They really served different purposes.

We interfaced a mag-card Selectric to a micro (NSC PACE) in '76. It worked but was pretty clunky. I junked it pretty quickly once I got an 8"floppy for it (cost $5K).

OS/2 with a 6GB hard drive was better.

r t f o a y n . n

ugs.

You haven't read what Phil posts. He's a physicist who has transcended his origins.

I've made hobby - over the years - of commenting on bad engineering publish ed in Rev. Sci. Instrum. papers. I only go after sitting ducks, but I've go t five published from about seven comments submitted. Lot's of physicists a re rotten electronic engineers, and haven't got a clue how inept they are. Phil Hobbs strikes me as a very good electronic engineer.

They do tend think that anything outside of physics is "stamp-collecting". Darwin had demonstrated quite how wrong that was, but Rutherford was quite as parochial as you'd expect from a jerk who grew up in New Zealand.

e countries you must be registered as an engineer or you are committing fra ud. I think Canada may be one. In the UK even a dog can call themselves an engineer and so it is far better that all professionals become registered - just as doctors do.

You'd be a mug to trust one, if the practice certificate was their only evi dence of competence.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Few aircraft designers are PEs. Or automobile designers, either. You'd better play it safe and walk.

You edited Telex messages by copying the tape onto a new tape- from the tape reader to the punch.

To delete characters for small corrections you could punch all the holes out but you'd still pay for the 1/10 of a second (IIRC) when that 'blank' character was transmitted overseas.

I imagine CNC tape was similar.

How things have changed.

A terabyte of SSD is very affordable these days.

--sp

--
Best regards,  
Spehro Pefhany 
Amazon link for AoE 3rd Edition:            http://tinyurl.com/ntrpwu8 
Microchip link for 2015 Masters in Phoenix: http://tinyurl.com/l7g2k48

Yeah, you don't get that combination unless you have people on staff with decades of domain experience to lead the tech work. Even then, the error rate reaches a constant and stays there.

The problem is that nobody wants to cost the error rate unless they absolutely have to.

That's the sort of place that needs to invest in test fixtures.

I ran minicom today. It's one degree up from punch cards.

Sure they do. They are used in things that make money.

Yeah. Oh well. It's ultimately their toy.

Right.

--
Les Cargill

No. Programmers are not Engineers. Professional Engineers are

Actually I'd prefer that they were talented, accomplished, and very careful. None of that has much to do with some government form. Safety has everything to do with a safety culture.

You keep bringing up these ridiculous false analogies that I've already eviscerated. All you seem to have is talking points. Haven't you actually _thought_ about this?

A straw man, again. You apparently have no idea of what the actual issues are.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

We punched the CNC codes on super-tough paper-mylar tape, so they could be read hundreds of times without wearing out.

I wrote an NC compiler that ran on a PDP-11 timeshare system. It translated simple English commands into the codes for a milling machine and a gigantic punch press. It had only one non-local "high level" command, PAT, that let the machinists define a pattern once and invoke it many times. In a few weeks, those guys had constructed elaborate and elegant program structures based on PAT. We were impressed.

It was fun working with the machinists. I started dirt-biking with them, and they were cool. They had awesome motorcycles. I had a Yamaha

250, and one of the machinists did too, so I tried his. It did an instant wheelie and tossed me into the air. They all laughed. The guy machined his own pistons.

Yeah. Our engineering productivity is many times what it used to be. Well, for some of us.

Hard drives seem to be awfully reliable. Maybe more reliable than SSDs? I love the terabyte external USB hard drives. I take a periodic whole-company backup home on a USB drive, for permanent archiving, with no intent to ever use them again unless we need to retrieve things.

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sleep better on a plane if you knew that the designers were all registered engineers.

. Yes it doesn't matter if my radio or TV breaks down I just send it back, but for any quality control you need to start with the right materials and manpower. There is no doubt that many people can put an Arduino matched to a motor and get it working, but I wouldn't have them designing a aircraft.

They may not be registered, but they will more than satisfy the requirement s to join - better than nothing.

That's not necessarily true. A PE license means absolutely nothing in these fields.