Real engineers don't need hype: EDA is the last bastion of fluff-free software engineering.(electronic design automation)

Electronic Business, July, 2005 by James, Geoffrey

I have a confession: I hate the software industry. PR flacks hyping trivial product features, CEOs bragging about private jets, pundits touting markets that grow from zero millions to zero billions in five years--the whole software scene is overblown, overdone and overwrought. Except for EDA. Although in many of my columns, I take the EDA companies to task--because that's my job as a journalist--I've discovered something uplifting about this industry segment: Where the rest of the software industry has gone over to the Dark Side of the Force, EDA remains last bastion of true software engineering.

Let me explain. I got into computers in 1977, when software programming was still in its infancy. Programmers were real engineers. Every operating system,...