61–70 of 186 posts
There are plenty of activities that are essential for engineering but not a sort of engineering themselves. Like writing documentation, or communicating requirements to your colleagues. Making instructions and operational procedures. Management. Accounting. Marketing. What makes making software an engineering discipline and making coffee not? Where is the line and why we presume we should be behind that line?
It's craft. But what about the math, you say. All kinds of craft demand understanding of the related math.
The math serves the outcomes, not the other way around.
(Not to diminish good craftsmanship, which I highly value.)
Most of software isn't engineering, it's just building. It's like a lot of these custom car/motorcycle builders vs actual engineers designing for a major manufacturer. You are both building a product but one places a lot more rigor on the science, data, and testing behind the decisions. That doesn’t mean the custom builders don't build good stuff, just that you won't get answers to things like how much force a partic…
Then you get paradoxes like why the rigor doesn't work in practice. These expensive CS books mathematically prove a map has faster access than a vector because it uses a binary tree. Yet the vector works faster because the CPU pipelines sequential operations very efficiently.
If you talk about editing the data structure, then it depends.
Most of software isn't engineering, it's just building. It's like a lot of these custom car/motorcycle builders vs actual engineers designing for a major manufacturer. You are both building a product but one places a lot more rigor on the science, data, and testing behind the decisions. That doesn’t mean the custom builders don't build good stuff, just that you won't get answers to things like how much force a partic…
It's solving and building, but most of all it's language. It's all language. Either telling the machine what to do or coordinating a group of people cohesively.
I tend to disagree with most of these rulesets that are meaningless to "engineering". The idea that a function should only be 40 lines long is offensive to me. Personally, I would rather have one 400 line function than ten 40 line functions. I'm a Ziguana. I care about handling edge cases and I think my programming language should be a domain specific language to produce optimal assembly.
I would not constrain other people who feel differently. I read an article where some project transitioned from Rust to Zig, even though the people on the team were all Rustaceans. Obviously their Rust people hated this and left! To me, that's not a step in the right direction just because I prefer Zig to Rust! That's a disaster because you're taking away the way your team wants to build software.
I think hardly any of the things we disagree on actually have much to do with "Engineering". We mostly aren't proving our code correct, nor defining all the bounds in which it should work. I personally tend to think in those terms and certain self-contained pieces of my software have these limits documented, but I'm not using tools that do this automatically yet. I'd love to build such tools in the coming years though. But there's always the problem that people build tools that don't notice common use-cases that are correct, and then people have to stop doing correct things that the tool can't understand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I've always wondered why UFOs are only a USA phenomenon It plain isn't and to claim that it is shows that you have done EXACTLY 0 research into the topic. This kind of bad faith engagement shows an utter lack of curiosity. UFOs are huge in South America within just seconds you can find hundreds of sightings and discussions about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varginha_UFO_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
This doesn't prove it's aliens. It does add to my mass-hysteria hypothesis. I want to see the biological remains firsthand in Zimbabwe, Japan, etc. I want to see the crater the UFO left on the ground. I want to see the craft. Where's the physical evidence? Not photos, actual dirt displaced, metal alloy, extraterrestrial biological remains, etc.
You don't notice it do you? Re-read again what I wrote. At no point did I argue that it's aliens. Intentionally.
You first point was proven wrong instantly "it's only an USA Phenomenon". You don't bother to research anything but stick with your hypothesis. You don't even go look for evidence yet are utterly convinced of the result of your complete lack of research.
Here's an example of metal alloy that's supposed to come from an UFO and shows an interesting composition we cannot replicate. It's a well known artefact:
https://tothestars.media/de-de/blogs/press-and-news/tts-anal...
It had some analysis done by different researchers https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237233241_Compositi...
Your lack of curiosity is still very obvious.
This isn't an uncommon lament, despite what the author thinks. The problem is that running "studies" on what the author and others are asking for is effectively impossible. You can't get 25 teams of suitably-random professionals to build a non-trivial program one way, and 25 to build it another, and then do statistically-significant analysis of them, because that would be a staggeringly expensive study... and that is…
And to explore running studies a bit further. The second time you build a system goes so much better because you already know all of the weird edge cases. And the third better still because your failures in the second time has cured you of some of your hubris.
Even if you somehow bankrolled 50 repeat projects and did the statistics etc correctly, you're still going to get some weird artifacts because some of those teams have people who did the thing before. You'll learn the wrong lesson when the real lesson is "make sure Bob is working on Bluetooth because he's done it 10 times before."
Starting with people with no experience is likewise not interesting because nobody really cares what lessons you learn by turning a bunch of muggles loose on something difficult.
What you need to bankroll is 50 teams worth of people who spend their entire careers testing out a hypothesis. (And even then you probably need to somehow control their professional communities in some way because again who cares what some small group of people approaches a problem when you could instead have people who go out and learn things from other people.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you ever want to see how they think, just check out the myriad UFO subreddits. It's pretty wild. Everything is aliens and a government cover up to those folks....even when you prove it's a floating trash bag they think you're a fool. There are a few rational commenters, but a lot of people that want to believe so bad they fall for all these grifters selling pseudoscience books and seminars.
> Everything is aliens and a government cover up to those folks....even when you prove it's a floating trash bag they think you're a fool. That's a pretty annoying sampling bias and doesn't reflect the community as a whole. There's plenty of rational voices that think most things are just balloons and drones, but they don't comment when it's boring and mundane. In those cases, only schizo voices remain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The math serves the outcomes, not the other way around.
That’s true for all natural sciences. That doesn’t make them mere craftsmanship. (Not to diminish good craftsmanship, which I highly value.)
Most of software isn't engineering, it's just building. It's like a lot of these custom car/motorcycle builders vs actual engineers designing for a major manufacturer. You are both building a product but one places a lot more rigor on the science, data, and testing behind the decisions. That doesn’t mean the custom builders don't build good stuff, just that you won't get answers to things like how much force a partic…