People posting comments without caring whether they are true or false undermines the presumption of good faith that underlies rational discourse. Please stop posting such comments on this site. Instead, only post comments that you have some reason to believe are true.
It is not about not caring if the statement is true or false. The statement neither absolutely true nor absolutely false, because there is no absolute definition of when software engineering started, or what "a lifetime" is. It is about making a statement that communicates information. However, if I must prove that my statement can reasonably considered "true" in order to prove that it does communicate the short span of time for which software engineering has existed:
- Avg. life expectancy in USA: 77.5 years
- 2025 - 77.5 = 1947.5
- In 1945, Turing published "Proposed Electronic Calculator"
- The first stored-program computer was built in 1948
- The term "software engineering" wasn't used until the 1960s
If you want to define "software engineering" such that it is more than 77.5 years old, that's fine. But saying that software engineering is less than 77.5 years old is clearly a reasonable stance.
Please stop berating me for a perfectly harmless and reasonably accurate statement. If you're going to berate me for anything, it should be for its brevity and lack of discussion-worthy content. But those are posted all the time.
