John Carmack discusses the art and science of software engineering

The talk itself is well worth the 3 hours.

I came to that same conclusion a few years ago. Sometime in college I was pretty happy, felt I was making good progression on real knowledge in a field. Now, a few years later - I'm not sure what I know is real and true, which are high order approximations, and which are flat out wrong, but still right enough to not cause too many problems.

an example: in grade school you learn how to mix colors, primary colors with paints, etc. then a little later, in middle school you learn no.. for light based, its not the same type of addition. then a little later you learn there are like an infinite possible primary colors - then a little later you learn color is actually a frequency or combination of frequencies, and you start asking yourself if your friend detects these colors the same way you do. does red to you really look blue to your friend.

it just gets weird.

> The more you know, the more you realize you don't know.

The thing I like about John Carmack is that he really appears to live this through and through. I can't say I know him or have worked with him or anything, but whenever I read something like this of his, I enjoy the fact that it is virtually free of ego and posture. He doesn't proclaim or state - he tries things, explores things, and talks about what he found, his successes and failures, and the next hill he wants to climb. He openly admits when things are more challenging than he thought they would be or if something he worked on didn't turn out how he wanted it to.

He is definitely right about the social aspect of software engineering. But I think he sells a lot of the tools short. For example, he brings up things like Monads, Lambda Calculus, and whatnot - but then immediately dismisses them as not affecting what one truly does.

But I think this really misses the point. In our industry it is really easy to disguise oneself as a professional (or even just someone who knows what they are doing), without really knowing much of anything. Meaning, our focus as an industry has been on making the simple things as simple as possible (i.e. scripting/dynamic languages, code generation, frameworks).

But what I see happening in the Haskell space for example (and even further in languages such as Agda) are attempts to distill things down to their elements. To find the true semantics behind a problem. This not only helps by producing cleaner and more readable code, but it also helps with communication.

I really do believe software is a scientific (and mathematical) exercise. The problem is most of industry does not treat it as such, and hence we end up in the mess we are in.