Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericHosick | Hacker News Reader

> Stop arguing over how other people create software; Ship Code instead.

Electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, architectural design and the medical profession, to name a few, have bodies of knowledge they are required to use.

Is it really a good idea for software developers to say "stop arguing over how other people create software; Ship Code instead" considering we don't have any industry standard bodies of knowledge?

View on HN

Considering we don't have any industry standard bodies of knowledge, yes it probably is a good idea, because we don't have anyone who can lay out a definitive answer on many of our preference based arguments.

i.e. these arguments will never end if there is no definitive answer, or body to pick one.

Industry standard bodies of knowledge arise from people doing, then talking about what they did, then doing some more, then talking some more. At no point did a God of Electrical Engineering hand down tablets.

Very good point. I stand corrected.

There is at least one serious effort underway to collect (or perhaps, catalogue) such a body of knowledge:

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/swebok

I think SWEBOK is interesting both as a demonstration of how far we have to go before we get anywhere near the standards of established engineering fields, and as a demonstration of how much we have already collectively figured out, even if most of us aren't familiar with more than a small fraction of what is out there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com