I do think programming is an engineering discipline. So is database administration. (Backups = changing the oil, that kind of thing.)

I also don't think software development is mature enough of a discipline to have licensing requirements that make sense.

It took medicine about 10,000 years, maybe more, to reach a point where it made sense to license practitioners, and even now there are conflicts on that point.

The real point of licensing requirements is cost to society. Fake doctors are more expensive to society than the cost of certifying and maintaining standards for doctors. That's only recently true, and to a large extent is due to lawsuit issues.

As was mentioned in the article about comparing doctors to programmers, very few programmers can save a human life, but at the same time, very few programmers can take a human life. Doctors, on the other hand, are in those positions regularly.

The same could be said for the engineers who design and/or maintain bridges. A bridge collapse can kill hundreds, maybe even thousands (for a big, heavy traffic bridge).

On the other hand, parents quite often administer basic medicine to their children, and many people are trained to administer first aid in emergency situations. Just about anyone can throw a few planks of wood over a stream on their own property, or build a tree-house.

I see software engineering going the same way, over time. Big, critical, high-expense, life-saving/threatening software projects will end up going to licensed individuals who are subject to fees, fines, lawsuits, etc., over their failures, and quite probably who are also subject to peer review for things like professional ethics. Small, minor, private software will be anyone who wants to. But before that differentiation can happen, standards will need to evolve further. Right now, standards apply more towards how you write the code, but have very little to do with what the end result is.