@minoru lot of text, little substance.

Programming is clearly engineering as a practice that stems from rigorous science. It is a branch of mathematics, and even more so than say electrical engineering is of physics.

The industry is not an engineering industry though. It has two crucial differences (one might say pathologies): production costs nothing, distribution costs nothing. This allows huge long term returns on investment in selling crap on marketing alone, allows to create an industry without an infrastructure, which applies to everything from embedded to web.

Things like human lives (or other extremes of importance) don't matter, not because we don't care, but because we don't have the ultimate solution that will save all lives (solve all important problems), and we can only improve on what we have through fair competition, which itself will define quality standards, written or unwritten. The latter maybe even more important, as regardless of law you can still get crap, and only way you would really know it, is when a local electrician or mechanic or plumber refuses to service it and recommends a replacement. Where is my local programmer? Ah, working for an international megacorp, making bottle caps for their snake oil.