As economics is known as ``The Miserable Science'', software engineering should be known as ``The Doomed Discipline'', doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter ``How to program if you cannot.''.