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If you haven’t caught Kyle Wilson’s recent piece, “Software is Hard,” I highly recommend it. The essay moves elegantly from book review, to musings on knowing when the code is “done,” to issues of measuring quality, to the ever-present problems of lateness and going over budget, to the potential inadequacy of “engineering” as the metaphor for writing software.

It’s the last topic that’s the most fascinating to me. Kyle points out that new software is written only in response to new problems (otherwise, you’d just use existing software). As such, new code ventures into the unknown, where you can, at best, only guess at the challenges you’ll encounter. We always try our best to assess what we’ll face, but by their very nature, these are imperfect assessments. As Kyle puts it, “The only way to avoid that is to have your design go all the way down to specifying individual lines of code, in which case you aren’t designing at all, you’re just programming.”

Which is not to say, of course, we should simply give up engineering. Without some sort of plan for design and advance assessment, we’d be utterly lost. Businesses couldn’t function and programmers couldn’t make a living. For better or worse, the smooth functioning of our society is founded on the arrogance of making accurate predictions, not just about business and software, but about everything from politics and law, to human behavior and psychology, to weather. Such hubris…

No surprise, then, that even real-world traditional engineering often fails to be predictable. Kyle mentions the Oakland Bay Bridge as a project that’s hugely over time and budget. Just yesterday, Boeing announced its much-anticipated Dreamliner would be six months late.

So maybe software engineering IS the right term after all.

Slashdot reported on an opinion piece by David Sivers entitled, “7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails.” It’s sparked heated discussion about languages, but if you read the article carefully, it’s not really anti-Ruby or pro-PHP, though David does imply serious shortcomings to Rails. He writes, “at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails’ preferences.”

The problem with the short piece is that he’s not very specific about what these “preferences” are. The main criticisms seem to be that Rails is too complicated, too slow, and doesn’t allow direct SQL. Complexity and performance are often the cost of using a large web framework; these don’t seem like Rails problems, but issues you’d have to deal with when using any big framework (in fact, there’s an apples-and-oranges dimension here: Ruby on Rails is a full web stack and architecture, whereas PHP is a scripting language with built-in access to tons of different libraries. But we’ll put that aside for now.). As for direct SQL, a lot of folks have pointed out that David is just plain mistaken about not being able to do what he wanted.

The real reasons he switched back actually have little to do with PHP per se: read the piece carefully and you’ll see he’s much more comfortable thinking in terms of libraries than frameworks. Also, he needed to integrate tightly with an existing codebase. Those two things are the real reasons why switching back to PHP worked for him. They don’t have anything to do with either the strengths or failures of Ruby on Rails itself.

David doesn’t quite do justice to his main point, which is actually about software development, not language features: don’t expect a much touted language or tool to work magic for you. Of course, this should apply as much to PHP as to Rails! I’m not trying to defend Rails, which I know zilch about. There’s a bigger lesson here: the strengths and weaknesses of languages have less to do with success than the overall environment, the functional and integration requirements, and the coders’ facility with a toolset.