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Software engineering ain’t what it used to be, according to a spectacularly dimwitted article in Computer Weekly. In fact today’s developers “do not apply engineering principles” , at least in the view of one Daniel Dresner, chairman of the Institute of Information Security Professionals.

The occasion for this bizzare assertion is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Software was a vital component of this great endeavour, and many of those who programmed it went on to achieve great things in the then embroynic industry. Incredibly this article argues that modern software may be of a lower standard than that which powered the primitive computers which guided the Apollo craft, because “formal approaches to software development have become unfashionable with the advent of rapid application development, agile development and extreme programming”.

Wha..?! This is an absurd thing to say even if you leave aside the palpably false implication that agile development methods lead to poor quality code, or ignore the huge advances in test-driven development, continuous integration and automated testing.

Of course the software that powers websites, games consoles and mobile phones isn’t always developed with the same rigour as that applied to vital avionic systems built by Nasa, Lockheed or Boeing. It’s intended for a completely different purpose. Nobody is going to die if Twitter throws a 404 error, but Twitter might go bankrupt if they spend a decade building multiply-redundant systems which allow you to text a drunken update from the back of a night bus. It’s like saying that the quality of conventional engineering has declined because your iPod could not survive atmospheric re-entry.