Re: C and C-style C++
"Certainly software standards are low compared to "real" engineering disciplines like civil engineering."
Hell, software standards are low compared to what software standards were just a couple of decades ago.
"But the days of being able to keep the entire state of the machine in your head as you program"
A correct point, but I don't see the relevance here. You don't (and never have) had to keep the entire state of the machine in your head in order to produce high-quality code. And it's not true that computers have only become so complex in the last couple of decades -- it's true for microcomputers, but many mainframes qualified as "too complex for a human to completely grok" from even before the microprocessor existed. And high-quality code was produced by the truckload then.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
