I have never liked the phrase "computer engineering." There is a quantum difference between what we do and what engineers do. That's not saying we're a bunch of lugnuts, or that we cannot take a rigorous approach to our work, but they are very different. My younger daughter, who is an engineering major, was just here for a short visit. She brought a take-home midterm, which coincidentally is for a comp sci class they have to take. Holy moley. To me the questions looked very intimidating and made me grateful I am out of school. It's comp sci with an engineering spin. For instance, they study MaxPad, a language I had never heard of. (That's MaxPad, 6 letters <g>). She said it's designed for engineers and has things like functions which perform linear algebra. It gave me a headache just looking at it.

>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.
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>>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.
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>>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.