There is nothing saying that allowing for some standardization means that we have to be stuck at 2003-levels of state of the art. And actually, yes many engineering disciplines do change, Civil engineering brings in new construction techniques, methods for non-destructive testing, improvements to materials and on and on, but it doesn't do so like the coked-up industry of software does it in such a free-for-all manner. It's a proper engineering discipline because there's the control, testing the best way to do things and rolling that out.
If we (meaning software 'engineers' and I tepidly include myself in that group) had half the self control in introducing insanity like the 10000th new javascript framework to read and write to a database like the 'proper' disciplines do, maybe it would be better because there's less churn. Why does it have to move so fast? Software is diverse and inconsistent and rapidly changing because 'the industry' (coked-out developers chasing the next big hit to their resume to level up) says it should. I just don't agree that we need that amount of change to do things that amount to mutating some data. If the techniques didn't grow beyond what was cool in 2007, or they were held there until the next thing could be evaluated and trained, but the knowledge and process around them did, perhaps we'd be in a better position. I know I certainly wouldn't mind maintaining something that was created in the last decade of the previous millennium knowing it was built with some sort of self-control and discipline in mind, and that the people working on it with me had the same mindset as well.
Simple - if you restrict the software industry, the US loses to China or any other country that doesn’t give a damn. And unless you censor the internet, there’s absolutely no way to prevent illicit software from crossing the border.
Would a business get in trouble for using it? Sure. But if all the businesses in your country are at a competitive disadvantage because the competition is so much brighter elsewhere, and that “sloppy constructed” software is allowing international competition to have greater productivity and efficiency, your country is hosed. Under your own theory, imagine if the US was stuck with ~2007 technology while China was in 2024. The tradeoff would be horrific - like, Taiwan might not exist right now, horrific.
Regulating software right now would kill the US competitive advantage. It narrows every year - that would do it overnight. The US right now literally cannot afford to regulate software. The EU, which can afford it, is already watching talent leaving.
There’s also the problem of the hundreds of billions of lines of code written before regulations running in production at this very moment. There are not enough programmers on earth that could rewrite it all to spec, even if they had decades. Does Google just get a free grandfathered-in pass then, but startups don’t?
If we (meaning software 'engineers' and I tepidly include myself in that group) had half the self control in introducing insanity like the 10000th new javascript framework to read and write to a database like the 'proper' disciplines do, maybe it would be better because there's less churn. Why does it have to move so fast? Software is diverse and inconsistent and rapidly changing because 'the industry' (coked-out developers chasing the next big hit to their resume to level up) says it should. I just don't agree that we need that amount of change to do things that amount to mutating some data. If the techniques didn't grow beyond what was cool in 2007, or they were held there until the next thing could be evaluated and trained, but the knowledge and process around them did, perhaps we'd be in a better position. I know I certainly wouldn't mind maintaining something that was created in the last decade of the previous millennium knowing it was built with some sort of self-control and discipline in mind, and that the people working on it with me had the same mindset as well.