What do the solutions to this problems in other engineering areas look like? Aren't they as dependent on caring professionals to define the "high quality plumbings" as we are? --Ilja Preuss They sure are, but they also have machines that help them attain this high quality. I partly regard IDEs and UDEs as a sort of machines software programmers, developers and architect use to build software systems. And what I say is that the *machines* we have today have to evolve quite a bit to achieve the degree of quality we can find in other engineering areas.
Mechanical engineering, for example, has been evolving for thousands of years. In comparison, software engineering (about 60 or so years) looks pretty young to me. Do you think that in 1000 years or even 100 years, people will still dumbly write primitive
Java or C# statements in a code editor? I don't think so...