🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <59257@nigel.ee.udel.edu>, duzan@cis.udel.edu (gdtltr@limbo.org (The Befuddled One)) writes:
|> In article <1991Jul19.225454.816@exurchn1.ericsson.se> exudnw@exurchn1.ericsson.se (Dave Williams) writes:
|> =>I think it's time we all banded together and required our local, state, and
|> =>national reperesentatives be licensed.  Assemblywoman Kalik could then be
|> =>sued for malpractice, among other things.
|> =>
|>    The main problem is that of who gives out the licenses. We would need
|> someone to insure that those who give out the licenses are qualified to do
|> so, i.e. a license to give out licenses. Thus we have a recurrence relation.
|> Where do we terminate the relation?
|> 
Engineering is moving towards requiring practicing engineers to be registered 
witht the state(s) that they practice in (though not required today)  It would
be analagous (sp?) to the bar exam for lawyers or the boards for doctors.  This
is a way for the state to help assure that the people practicing are competent
and not outside of there realm of competency.  This type of exam is a 
_professional_ certification.  Programmers are a _professional_ group of
people.  There is software that is very difficult and has the potential effect
of taking several lives.  Mentioned has been medical software and software that
is life-critical.  What about cars?  The wrongly programmed software can have
detrimental effects, and the amount of hardware and software is not going down.
What about industrial situations?  I have heard horror stories about an 
industrial controller that went haywire because the 'professional' was not
able to correctly write interrupt driven software; compound that problem by
writing it in assembly. As a final example, consider aviation electronics.
Very simply put, if it fails, you die.  If there were an error in the software
of the primary computer, so would it be in the backups.

Before I get flamed to death (asbestos suit being donned at this minute :-),
please consider that there may be lives involved  in software.  The actions
could be devistating.  The idea that NJ wants to convey is some sort of 
_professional_ standards, based solely upon what I have read in this newsgroup.
There intentions are to promote solid software, and not screwed up hack jobs
written by fly-by-night operations.  Consider that Disk-Jockeys working at
stations over 100 watts _must_ be liscenced by the FCC.  As the transmitter
power goes up, so do the requiremnents.  And the DJ may  not have anything
to do with the station outside of his little room.

andy
wessels@thor.cc.nd.edu