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Is Software Engineering an Oxymoron?


By Allen Holub
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March 15, 2005 —  (Page 1 of 3)
There has been a lot said about education on these pages in the past few weeks. Nonetheless, I want to worry this issue a bit more before going back to the mundane topics I’m supposed to be writing about, like Java. I believe there’s an underlying issue that is really at the root of the matter: The nature of computer programming has changed radically in the past 30 years, but our definition of computer science has not. Consequently, we’re approaching the subject in a way that’s simply incorrect.

Computer science started out as a kind of mathematics. Computers were little more than glorified adding machines intended to ease the drudge work associated with solving some classes of mathematical problems. The task of programming a computer was little more than presenting an algorithm to the machine so that it could crunch numbers.

Computer science departments, then, sprung from the math departments, like Athena from the head of Zeus, fully armed. Computer science is still sometimes defined as that branch of mathematics that concerns itself with the analysis of computer programs. This topic is interesting but has little relevance when it comes to actually creating computer programs.

Computers are good at solving mathematical problems of course, but the vast majority of programs have little or nothing to do with algorithms and number-crunching. Consequently, training in mathematics is of little or no value when it comes to writing good computer programs. If it were, then mathematicians and physicists would be brilliant programmers. The reality is that this group tends to write miserable code that’s focused too much on algorithms and too little on structure.

In fact, computer science is neither a science nor an engineering discipline. Science concerns itself with the formulation and proof of hypotheses. Programmers just don’t do that. Similarly, all engineering disciplines except software engineering concern themselves primarily with the mathematical analysis of structures, be they physical structures or electronic circuits. Programmers don’t do that, either.




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