"When we say software development is a craft, we're saying that it's like shoemaking, pottery or woodworking."
The point being, there are intricate details that are very hard to deliver in the traditional class-room oriented school environment with well defined requirements.
Those do not state anything about scalability. Crafts can scale - like for example how the old giant cathedrals and castles were built in middle-age europe.
They don't say anything about mindsets either. You need an engineers mindset to buid a cathedral or a castle.
Thespecificproblem with crafts is that adapting to new requirements is a complete hit and miss process. The reason for this problem is the lack or proper theoretical framework in which to pose ones work and into which embed the requirements themselves.
The program verification people are working towards solving this problem, see for example Leslie Lamport's work in TLA+.
But until we have a general, mathematical proof backed compiler for requirements, as well as for the program implementation, we are pretty much stuck with craftsmen.
(Well, we have proof compilers but those are at the moment completely unusable for general programming since they are so complex to use.)
The point being, there are intricate details that are very hard to deliver in the traditional class-room oriented school environment with well defined requirements.
Those do not state anything about scalability. Crafts can scale - like for example how the old giant cathedrals and castles were built in middle-age europe.
They don't say anything about mindsets either. You need an engineers mindset to buid a cathedral or a castle.
The specific problem with crafts is that adapting to new requirements is a complete hit and miss process. The reason for this problem is the lack or proper theoretical framework in which to pose ones work and into which embed the requirements themselves.
The program verification people are working towards solving this problem, see for example Leslie Lamport's work in TLA+.
But until we have a general, mathematical proof backed compiler for requirements, as well as for the program implementation, we are pretty much stuck with craftsmen.
(Well, we have proof compilers but those are at the moment completely unusable for general programming since they are so complex to use.)