I think there is a certain degree to which one could start certifying software engineers on a project management perspective, because the principals of how one approaches a project and brings it to completion aren't that different from any other project in any other industry.

Huh?

Project management on a website that has an incremental 1 week release cycle has no relationship to project management of an internal database upgrade that is planned for 6 months or project management for developing a shrink wrapped game over 2 years.

The problems, documents, workflow, problems, types of people you need involved, etc are radically different in these three cases.

A user's requirements are going to be the same no matter what programming language you use. The way you test the software is going to be the same no matter what programming language you use. Within a specific programming paradigm, how you build the software is a shear matter of syntax, all the parts are going to have to be the same.

I disbelieve.

I've been in a situation where I was creating a reporting system, and was sitting in a group of people building a website. There was absolutely no similarity in requirements, testing, rollout procedures, and turnaround expectations between me and the other developers. This despite the fact that we were working in the same organization, on projects specified by the same product managers!

As for a specific programming paradigm comment, the statement seems to me to be vacuously true because you define "paradigm" to include the internal structure of the software, or else false. Because I've seen many cases where two people deliver essentially the same functionality using the same basic toolkit, but the internal organization, pieces, etc are completely different.

COBOL, C, C#, Clojure, C-whatever-next, it doesn't matter. Wood, stone, and iron. The principles haven't changed much at all.

Huh? COBOL doesn't even have recursion. C has function pointers but no closures. C# has closures but no Lisp style macros. Clojure has all of the above. The capabilities of the languages are different, and therefore the proper design and structure of software is as well.

Also where principles have not changed, people's understanding of them may. For instance take test driven development. It isn't new - when Larry Wall delivered Perl 1 in the mid-80s it came with a reasonably complete test suite. When CPAN was founded in the mid-90s the whole perl Makefile.pl, make, make test, make install routine was already standard. And the result was that Perl got a good name for being portable in practice.

However as recently as a decade ago you'd have been hard pressed to find many advocating a test driven style of development. Problems existed that it would work well for. Useful enough tools existed for people to take advantage of them. But there wasn't wide spread acceptance of that knowledge.

Today if you are a programmer and don't know the basics of unit testing, you need some remedial re-education. And a lot of organizations don't use it.

In short unit testing today is where source control was in the late 90s which is where structured programming was in the 80s. It is a good idea. It is widely recognized to be a good idea. But it is a good idea that is more honored by the breach than the observance in your average programming shop.