Software engineering has not yet gone through a true manufacturing disruption. We cannot put software on the kind of assembly line/stamping process...
Such a naive view.) The whole Java ecosystem was especially marketed as a "industry standard" way of creating a "coding sweatshops". All you need is coding and testing teams, and a bureaucratic process (such as Scrum) on top of it.
With very rare exceptions of some OSS or in-house projects (Google, FB) most of software industry consists of such sweatshops which are almost an assembly lines which produce bloatware that mere passes most of tests.
Have you ever seen so-called Enterprise Software? ERPs? Web-portals?) Or take a look at the bloatware MS produces - these all products of such software-manufacturing processes.
Now about an artisan analogy. True (gifted) artists are extremely rare nowadays as thew were in the ancient times. Just take a look at the few examples:
- the requests module for Python. It is such a rare example of clean, idiomatic, human-readable Programming (not mere coding) that it could be considered as an art of programming. How many other modules programmed with such craftsmanship are around?
- nginx and redis are the example of the art of Software Engineering. They are works of art because of an approach and personal involvement of its authors.
- Plan9 team, FreeBSD's and OpenBSD's core teams, the author Gambit-C, authors of MIT Scheme, Symbolics Inc., the authors of Emacs are examples of a teams of gifted programmers.
If you want to see the examples of PG's "painters" - these people are. They are artisans of our craft. OK, there might be few hundreds more of such craftsman in the past (who created Lisps and other marvels) but it is mere 1% of all the field.
Such a naive view.) The whole Java ecosystem was especially marketed as a "industry standard" way of creating a "coding sweatshops". All you need is coding and testing teams, and a bureaucratic process (such as Scrum) on top of it.
With very rare exceptions of some OSS or in-house projects (Google, FB) most of software industry consists of such sweatshops which are almost an assembly lines which produce bloatware that mere passes most of tests.
Have you ever seen so-called Enterprise Software? ERPs? Web-portals?) Or take a look at the bloatware MS produces - these all products of such software-manufacturing processes.
Now about an artisan analogy. True (gifted) artists are extremely rare nowadays as thew were in the ancient times. Just take a look at the few examples:
- the requests module for Python. It is such a rare example of clean, idiomatic, human-readable Programming (not mere coding) that it could be considered as an art of programming. How many other modules programmed with such craftsmanship are around?
- nginx and redis are the example of the art of Software Engineering. They are works of art because of an approach and personal involvement of its authors.
- Plan9 team, FreeBSD's and OpenBSD's core teams, the author Gambit-C, authors of MIT Scheme, Symbolics Inc., the authors of Emacs are examples of a teams of gifted programmers.
If you want to see the examples of PG's "painters" - these people are. They are artisans of our craft. OK, there might be few hundreds more of such craftsman in the past (who created Lisps and other marvels) but it is mere 1% of all the field.