[thinkzilla]

I am sympathetic to the motivations and argument in the article, but the analogy with bridge building is flawed.

In engineering, if your assumptions are correct and you apply the formulas correctly, the bridge will not fall.

This is _not_ true of software, since it suffers from mathematical incompleteness. Computation is isomorphic to mathematics, and, just as there is no way to objectively estimate how long it will take to prove a theorem, there is no way _objectively_ estimate program properties, even simple things like "will this program ever print the string "xx". The proofs are variations of the Halting problem.

http://scribblethink.org/Work/Softestim/kcsest.pdf

Writing software is analogous to discovering the equations of physics of a bridge (physics/math) rather than applying them (engineering).

[clifdweller]

that is basically the point the author missed. The PE license is to grant an individual a license for them to certify theirs and others works meets established guidelines. Now over time this may become true that something like level 2,3,4 are vague guidelines now but in future they will become more concrete. At that point it might become necessary to certify that a companies system meets those guidelines for the algorithms used.