Dick you sound like someone who have had a lot of really interesting experiences in so many areas of life. I wish I could have sat down with you face to face once and heard some of your stories.

And you know, being able to ask tons of questions 😁

E.g. I have been intrigued by the engineer perspective on software engineering. I remember reading an interesting piece once by someone who was formly an engineer who wrote a lot about testing in software.

He remarked on how in engineering you build in testability. E.g. like a integrated circuit will have ways for you to observe its state and test it.

A rocket engine will frequently have all sorts of connection points where you can measure internal state to look at how it is doing.

I believe this guy was critical of the software engineering idea of creating black boxes that we only test and observe on the outside. Like he was arguing that you should build the software to allow some kind of probing/testing/observation of internal behavior.

To be honest I don't know if I represent the argument well, as it was years ago since I read this. But I had the impression that he was critical of unit testing or at least how software engineers tend to do it. He talked about testing having to carry their own weight. That you throw away tests with little value.

There was lots of perspectives there which really caught my attention but which I don't remember well anymore. But it did really make me wonder how real engineering works different. Since you come from real engineering, I would be really curious to know what you think of all the more popular fads in software engineering today, whether test-driven design, unit testing etc.

I have just started looking at the paper by Kay which you linked to, so I don't have any immediate reflections on it.