TemporalBeing's Journal: Programming vs. Software Engineering & Why Software Is Hard

I noticed the Slashdot Article on Why Software Is Hard and wrote a response in my Blog. Should be a good read for any techy. The blog entrie primary talks about Software Engineering vs. Programming. Needless to say, these go hand-in-hand with why software is hard. To quote from the Blog:

The key difference, however, is that the Software Engineer realizes that the "programming process" is just the implementation phase of creating software; and that there is a lot more to be done before the implementation phase can even begin. Comparitively, the programmer wants to just jump in and start writing code as soon as they have been handed a task, skipping the rest of the process, and possibly even ignoring any part of that process if anything from it was handed to him/her.

And FYI - the blog is more than just a link to the Slashdot article, and its related article. It also includes a link to few postings on OS News and its sister article, as well as some responses to a couple of the comments to that article. Needless to say, Slashdot (from what I could see) was a lot more forgiving of the original article.