>I've stopped using terms like science and engineering when it comes to software and started using the term gardening. It feels so much closer to what we do.

I like the term gardening. There is science involved too or at least there should be more. Mostly I see a rampant collection of weeds - code spewed in every direction and it grows. It is not well directed. Little examples - a stored procedure of the same name as a prg in an exe and the two pieces of code do a similar task but totally differently. I don't have a lot of use for VFP stored procedures, since they are fired by the local pc and not the remote server.

If anything, a gardener would prune and tie and graft to the goal of making something healthy and beautiful. Some are just letting the garden go to - is the word seed?

>
>
>>I have never found software development to be a pure science or a pure art. Software development is a craft. Maybe it leans a little more towards a science. There are red rules you always follow and blue rules you use as guidelines (stored procedures and star-schema data marts for analytic apps, haha). There are people who can build things on questionable architecture, but mask it well enough that no one notices. Of course, that's more likely to occur on single man projects, and this industry has had plenty of those. There is a danger of being self-taught, if you don't have a mentor...the danger is not developing bad practices, but rather learning to be clever enough to mask bad practices.
>>
>>I don't like the idea of establishing liability and things along those lines. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, it certainly does. But I'm not sure we're prepared to change the formula for our "craft" to invite that kind of evaluation, at least not formally. This is a complicated topic, and Mike Y. I have to say, for all the times I agree with you on things, on this one I tend to see this differently. Not saying I disagree - I just have a different view of it. I've known good or at least competent developers who built crap - partly because they were in bad situations (or allowed themselves to fall into bad situations). I just tend to think this is a very complicated topic - and I'd rather just let the market weed out those who truly shouldn't be building things for people.