" 'Software engineering' is something of an oxymoron," L. Peter Deutsch, a software veteran who worked at the fabled Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the seventies and eighties, has said. "It's very difficult to have real engineering before you have physics, and there isn't anything even close to a physics for software."
(Rosenberg: p. 276)
However, is it even possible to find out the "physics of software"? Is there one? The natural answer to that question is that, obviously, there is none. Software doesn't have a physical existence of any type whatsoever. It only exists in the form of bits and code and, prior to that, in a programmer's mind or, at the very best, some well documented specs. In that case, we could assume that Deutsch is right on the money: there is (and there will never be) any true software engineering discipline. And yet, is Deutsch's premise correct? Is it true that only physical things can be "engineered"? I suppose it all depends on the approach one takes to the issue. If we start from a mechanistic point of view, the assumption that only something physical can be engineered appears to be true. However, if we take a more systemic approach, it would appear as if everything is information, bits that flow around and can be channeled in one form or another. If his latter vision were true, then the problem is not so much that software engineering would be impossible but rather that we'd have to modify our own concept of what engineering means.
