Pointers are variables that don’t hold data themselves but instead hold a reference to it. It’s really common to redirect pointers to reference something other than what they originally referenced, which is the joke in this comic. He is changing the conversation so that Star Wars actually refers to Jaws.
I think the humor is meant to be in the juxtaposition between “reference” in media contexts (e.g. “I am your father”) and “reference” in programming contexts and applying the latter context to the former one.
What does “I’m your father” mean if the movie is jaws?
I think the absurdity of that question is part of said humor. That being said, I didn’t find it funny either.
To reference a movie in common vocabulary is to bring it up in conversation.
Referencing in programming terms like C refers to assigning a value to a variable. You can re-assign those variables to new values and then de-reference (read) the new value.
They are conflating the common meaning of reference with the much more obscure programming definition (obscure at least among non-programmers).
Star wars = “no, I am your father” (reference) Jaws = movie about hunting killer shark (reference) Star wars = movie about hunting killer shark (OP is pretending we can treat movie references like variable references and re-assigns the star wars variable to mean something else) “Hey, have you seen star wars? The movie about hunting a killer shark?” (De-referencing your newly re-assigned variable)
I personally don’t find it funny because these types of jokes essentially boil down to “I used a concept outside of its context, and for that reason alone it is funny”. However, with a lot of these jokes the context is so narrow (i.e. programming) that they are almost universally not understood by wider audiences.
Software engineering is just what any “engineering” field would be if they didn’t have standards. We have some geniuses and we have some idiots.
Mechanical engineers, civil engineers, electrical engineers, etc. are often forced to adhere to some sort of standard. It means something to say “I’m a civil engineer” (in most developed nations). You are genuinely liable in some instances for your work. You have to adhere to codes and policies and formats.
Software engineering is the wild west right now. No rules. No standards. And in most industries we may never need a standard because software rarely kills.
However, software is becoming increasingly important in our daily lives. There will likely come a day wherein similar standards take precedence and the name “software engineer” is only allowed to those who adhere to those standards and have the proper certs/licenses. I believe Canada already does this.
Software engineers would be responsible for critical software, e.g: ensuring phones connecting to an emergency operator don’t fail, building pacemakers, securing medical records, etc. I know some of these tasks already have “experts” behind them. But I don’t think software has any licensing/governing.
Directly opposed to “engineering” would be the grunt work which I do.
Engineer tends to be a protected term in many countries, so software engineer is no exception. It’s words like “programmer” or “developer” which are probably unregulated
The weird thing is that engineer is a protected term in Canada but every software dev title I’ve had so far includes it anyway. It doesn’t seem enforced at all here
I honestly thought there was too, my official job title / offer includes it in the role, despite the role explicitly having no requirement for an engineering degree.
I always found it funny, how I could do a 4 year electrical engineering degree, then work as an electrical engineer for 4 years, but never do my final law/ethics exam so couldn’t call myself an electrical engineer, but could just teach myself python and call myself a software engineer, turns out I was wrong.
It is awkward though, especially in a remote work world, given that we compete directly against American “software engineers” for the exact same jobs.
Software engineering does have standards and methods to developing software. These standards and methods are applied in Defence and Aerospace applications. Software engineering was developed or conceived by NATO to manage the increasing complexity of software development.
The big problem is people often confuse software development or programming with software engineering. Calling anyone that programs a software engineer. This isn’t the case. It’s entirely possible to be a software engineer without knowing how to code (but impractical).
I’d be very interested in learning more about how Canada manages “software engineer.” Because whatever is being done certainly doesn’t seem to include mandating where regulated professionals must be employed or punishing failures.
Saskatchewan’s electronic health records system (eHealth) has had a couple of egregious failures that it shouldn’t have taken a “software engineer” to prevent.
Several 911 services became unavailable during an outage that happened to also disrupt point of sale payment systems nationwide.
Both of the relevant companies are telecommunications companies (Telus and Rogers, respectively), where one would expect “software engineering” to be conducted by “software engineers” regardless of regulation.
A quick search for breaches in critical personal information will show that Canada is performing about as well as the US. Which is to say, abysmally.
“because software rarely kills” Depends on what you mean by rarely. Therac-25 was extremely dangerous due to a software bug. And this was over 40 years ago.
Industrial robot accidents are a lot more common than needed and almost all are due to software “problems” (bad path planning, bad safety implementation, or just bugs in the control system software)
Yes these things kill less than guns, or cars, or cranes, etc. But they still have affect in a lot of those accidents.
There are very few things anymore that don’t have some kind of logic built into them. Be it software or analog logic, it was still “programmed” or designed. If there was something missed in design, that can easily have adverse affects that can lead to accidents and death not immediately attributed to the software.
I was comparing it to civil or mechanical engineering. I agree that programming/software is growing and “infiltrating” our lives. That’s why I think it will become a licensed/certified term in the future. Software engineer will require a cert and some products will require certified engineers. Whereas web apps developers (most likely) will not use that title most of the time and we will just bifurcate those who work on “critical software” and those that do not.
There are definitely quality certifications for software. Plenty of govt acquisitions contracts require such certifications. We probably aren’t far from laws or executive mandates which require such things tbh
We are rebuilding a train station at (currently) 366% the planned cost and an estimated delivery time of 200% the original estimate, into rock that might swell when in contact with water and heave the station out of the ground, in order to decrease the station’s capacity by 17%
It is highly political projects, politicians offloaded their old friends and competitiors onto the boeards and other functions and in the case of the airport major planning was undertaken by a guy who is a technical drawer and not an engineer.
Most of these fuck ups could have been prevent, if the project management was done by project managers with an engineering background and if the owners side would have been represented by peoplewith a technical backgrounds.
Source: i have worked in civil engineering for public projects. We wasted 50% of the time explaining Politicians and MBA bros C-levels why they can’t start by building the roof and why replanning half the stuff is a bad idea, when we are already on the market with bids for contractors.
Well sure that’s fundamentally true, but really doesn’t give any sort of accurate picture of how estimates are done any more than “humans are just collections of cells” does, and anybody who does estimates without using some sort of data as the basis and is purely guessing is doing it wrong as fuck.
It’s not like we have no idea how long certain tasks have taken in the past, or what affects how long something will take.
The company that under-promises won’t win the bid, though. Unfortunately the norm now is to overpromise, and then squeeze as many extra fees and concessions out of the project as possible.
There’s also a culture of contractors vs engineers where limits willingness to work together to find solutions. “not my fault”.
I personally disagree. Took 3 years of Electrical Engineering courses in college but finished with a B.S in Computer Science. Both are valid engineering disciplines, the only thing lacking on the computer side are standardized licensing tests and an oversight body. Software engineers have to build software that can affect life and death too, but somehow we don’t have as much regulation in the US which is super odd to me.
What makes something engineering vs not? Personally what I do doesn’t feel like engineering because I imagine engineering as being about following a particular process and doing things in a very cautious and structured way, where programming is normally way more chaotic.
The fact that you feel programming is not that makes me sad. But likely dependent on what software and what you work with. For example, if you build software for NASA or Baxter and dialysis machines and the likes, you’ll get fired fast for not being structured. Working for Elon Musk and Twitter… Well…
I don’t think it has to be a sad thing. Without that sort of structure you can be more imaginative, which has many advantages. Again, I don’t want to be an engineer, I feel that would suck all the joy out of it and just isn’t my style. That isn’t to say an engineering approach to programming doesn’t exist or isn’t useful/necessary in some cases, but I would say it isn’t the norm and probably shouldn’t be.
Further, you can’t design something like the Burj Khalifa without creativity
Maybe the line goes where you are risking peoples life or not, maybe somewhere else. It still makes me sad that you equal programming with chaos. But that is very context driven. The drive for new software, new interfaces, new tech overall naturally breeds less oversight and less structure naturally ofc. But it doesn’t have to be that way, nor should it be if you ask me
Which are used to calculate stresses for dams, fluid dynamics for planes and ships, capacity and load simulations for power, and to compile and operate servers.
Software engineers are the pinnacle of engineering.
Check out this book on Amazon (or your library) to see just how clever and useful we really are.
If you need a book to tell you how useful you are, chances are, it's claims might.be a bit overblown. The profession that has most of those.books written about them are managers after all. Just saying.
Software engineering doesn’t treat failure anywhere near important enough for me to consider it proper engineering. Bugs are expected, excused and waived, which for anything critical just isn’t acceptable in my opinion.
Bugs are inevitable. Humans can’t write more than a few dozen lines without making a mistake - it’s inevitable because we’re barely sentient apes, floundering to understand the full scope of the problem space
But through methodology, bugs can be mitigated. You can reduce their number, and fail gracefully. We have countless ways to do it, and we teach how widely
There’s a science to it all, and those of us worth our salt know it… It’s not our fault that management disregards our warnings and pushes ever tighter deadlines.
We know how to do better, our warnings just fall on deaf ears far more often then not
Meh. There’s a saying in my field: “anyone can build a bridge, only an engineer can make one that barely doesn’t fall down”.
Humorously reductive as it is, software is what makes that “barely” thinner than human calculation would normally yield. So… Yeah. Not what I’d call a pinnacle.
Yes! Now I get to continue enjoying the fruits of unpaid labor. Even better I’ll be able to complain about every niche issue I have without ever contributing anything. Woohoo!
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