Reflections on Sudoku, or the Impossibility of Systematizing Thought
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Re: Reflections on Sudoku, or the Impossibility of Systematizing Thought
#2I was fascinated by the "Sudoku Affair", found myself speculating on the internal mindset of TDD advocates, and ended up with an unsatisfying conclusion that you can't systematize thought. Not my best writing but thought I'd share nonetheless.
Re: Reflections on Sudoku, or the Impossibility of Systematizing Thought
#3Isn't there a less-conceptual (but still conceptual) problem that correctness of software is commonly abrupt rather than continuous? You don't get a series of almost-right programs gradually approximating the right program, you have a correct program and variations on it may fail completely.
Of course, whether this is literally true depends on what sort of algorithmic problem you're approaching.
But there must be many real-world problems in which the very-nearly-correct program produces completely wrong behavior that doesn't resemble the correct behavior at all. In those circumstances, you couldn't expect to find the correct program empirically through iterative improvements.
Edit: Maybe the incremental test-driven approach would work in cases where you have an externally given specification or design that already breaks the algorithmic part up into smaller, easier, and more verifiable pieces.
Re: Reflections on Sudoku, or the Impossibility of Systematizing Thought
#4Isn't there a less-conceptual (but still conceptual) problem that correctness of software is commonly abrupt rather than continuous? You don't get a series of almost-right programs gradually approximating the right program, you have a correct program and variations on it may fail completely. Of course, whether this is literally true depends on what sort of algorithmic problem you're approaching. But there must be man…
Yes. The difference between "A program that does what you want" and "A program that crashes on startup" can be one character.
Re: Reflections on Sudoku, or the Impossibility of Systematizing Thought
#5I was fascinated by the "Sudoku Affair", found myself speculating on the internal mindset of TDD advocates, and ended up with an unsatisfying conclusion that you can't systematize thought. Not my best writing but thought I'd share nonetheless.
I think there’s an analogy in the dumb management dream that there’s a process by which you can replace these expensive skilled workers with cheap unskilled idiots and still get great results.
Another variation: the magic process that lets you get great results from people who don’t care.
Excellence doesn’t come solely from process. The benchmarks of great process with unskilled workers who don’t care is fast food, and this product is consistently mediocre. Consistency is good but consistent mediocrity is an unworthy ambition in many fields.
NASA is massively process driven but they get people to space and back, and the people in their process are highly skilled and care deeply.
Larry Wall, inventor of Perl, used to say (and probably still does) that complexity has to go somewhere. If you’re solving a complex problem then either it’s a simple program with complex tools, or a complex program with simple tools.
That’s really stuck with me. The art of library, framework, language, API design is to provide a set of tools — if you make simple tools then complex problems become complex programs. And if you offer complex tools, complex problems can have simple solutions. And people will gripe at you for all the punctuation for decades. :)
But the complexity exists and can’t be wished away. Which is kinda your point too. Thanks for writing!
Re: Reflections on Sudoku, or the Impossibility of Systematizing Thought
#6I was fascinated by the "Sudoku Affair", found myself speculating on the internal mindset of TDD advocates, and ended up with an unsatisfying conclusion that you can't systematize thought. Not my best writing but thought I'd share nonetheless.
I think there’s an analogy in the dumb management dream that there’s a process by which you can replace these expensive skilled workers with cheap unskilled idiots and still get great results. Another variation: the magic process that lets you get great results from people who don’t care. Excellence doesn’t come solely from process. The benchmarks of great process with unskilled workers who don’t care is fast food, a…
> there’s a process by which you can replace these expensive skilled workers with cheap unskilled idiots and still get great results.
> Another variation: the magic process that lets you get great results from people who don’t care.
Isn't that pretty much what the US military does? They take in "dumb" teens + docs + processes and get whatever it is they need out of this? It's also cheap (compared w/ industry). And by the end of the exercise the "dumb" teens become skilled in their own niche, some of them highly skilled (see nuclear specialists, ATCs, pilots, navigators, managers, procurement, etc.)
The military processes are at the base of lots of organisational stuff we have in software dev and business as well (agile, scrum, ooda, etc)
Re: Reflections on Sudoku, or the Impossibility of Systematizing Thought
#7I was fascinated by the "Sudoku Affair", found myself speculating on the internal mindset of TDD advocates, and ended up with an unsatisfying conclusion that you can't systematize thought. Not my best writing but thought I'd share nonetheless.
I think there’s an analogy in the dumb management dream that there’s a process by which you can replace these expensive skilled workers with cheap unskilled idiots and still get great results. Another variation: the magic process that lets you get great results from people who don’t care. Excellence doesn’t come solely from process. The benchmarks of great process with unskilled workers who don’t care is fast food, a…
> Consistency is good but consistent mediocrity is an unworthy ambition in many fields.
Sorry to take only a small part of an otherwise great comment but is this actually true? It seems to me that there is a great many fields in which consistency is more important than excellence, especially if the striving for excellence produces great misses as well sometimes. In a well-designed system with some allowed tolerance, as long as it's good enough you are fine. Take the electricity grid for example: There's no prizes for maintaining the frequency to within a nano-Hertz of the spec. There are very large fines for being outside the spec (+/-0.050 Hertz for the EU grid). Being consistently within spec is much more valuable than occasionally performing much better than the spec.
It is only in extreme winner-takes-all fields like sports, spacefaring and entrepreneuring that being the absolute best is what you want. In most other fields being consistently decent beats out varying excellence. I definitely wouldn't want my dentist to take a risky moonshot in pursuit of excellence, for example.
Re: Reflections on Sudoku, or the Impossibility of Systematizing Thought
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there’s an analogy in the dumb management dream that there’s a process by which you can replace these expensive skilled workers with cheap unskilled idiots and still get great results. Another variation: the magic process that lets you get great results from people who don’t care. Excellence doesn’t come solely from process. The benchmarks of great process with unskilled workers who don’t care is fast food, a…
> there’s a process by which you can replace these expensive skilled workers with cheap unskilled idiots and still get great results. > Another variation: the magic process that lets you get great results from people who don’t care. Isn't that pretty much what the US military does? They take in "dumb" teens + docs + processes and get whatever it is they need out of this? It's also cheap (compared w/ industry). And by…
I feel like you're saying that education (as practiced by the US military) is a somewhat reliable process for taking unskilled people and making them skilled. I agree.
The US Military have admissions criteria. They bounce people out in Basic Training and in every other part of training. Not everyone gets to be an ATC, a pilot, or a nuclear specialist. Air Traffic Control turns out not to be a process you can put an unskilled person into. It requires training and careful integration, and once you have a skilled person with many hours invested in them, perhaps you can let them direct traffic.
Training isn't a magic process that takes unskilled people who don't care and delivers great results every time. The equivalent in our world would be "I'll hire cheap people who don't know how to program, put them through a Bootcamp process, and then I'll have great programmers." That didn't work.
I am trying to say that: every version of programming where there's been The Process You Just Have To Follow (from Jackson Structured Design) has failed significantly and hasn't been a substitute for hiring smart people who care. If someone came to me with a business plan that was "hire mediocre people who don't care, and we'll achieve great results because of My Process", I'd be veeeeery skeptical indeed.
Re: Reflections on Sudoku, or the Impossibility of Systematizing Thought
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there’s an analogy in the dumb management dream that there’s a process by which you can replace these expensive skilled workers with cheap unskilled idiots and still get great results. Another variation: the magic process that lets you get great results from people who don’t care. Excellence doesn’t come solely from process. The benchmarks of great process with unskilled workers who don’t care is fast food, a…
> there’s a process by which you can replace these expensive skilled workers with cheap unskilled idiots and still get great results. > Another variation: the magic process that lets you get great results from people who don’t care. Isn't that pretty much what the US military does? They take in "dumb" teens + docs + processes and get whatever it is they need out of this? It's also cheap (compared w/ industry). And by…
Where do you get the idea that this is cheap? Militaries are somewhat famous for being incredible money sinks. They need incredibly specific skills that are not really taught in the civilian world. This means the military needs to train everyone at its own cost. So while the input might be "cheap, unskilled idiots", there is then a significant expense to turn them into expensive skilled non-idiots before they are ready for duty.
As someone who worked inside the military for 14 years, it is also quite a stretch to say they consistently get "great" results tbh.
Re: Reflections on Sudoku, or the Impossibility of Systematizing Thought
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there’s an analogy in the dumb management dream that there’s a process by which you can replace these expensive skilled workers with cheap unskilled idiots and still get great results. Another variation: the magic process that lets you get great results from people who don’t care. Excellence doesn’t come solely from process. The benchmarks of great process with unskilled workers who don’t care is fast food, a…
> Consistency is good but consistent mediocrity is an unworthy ambition in many fields. Sorry to take only a small part of an otherwise great comment but is this actually true? It seems to me that there is a great many fields in which consistency is more important than excellence, especially if the striving for excellence produces great misses as well sometimes. In a well-designed system with some allowed tolerance,…
"I definitely wouldn't want my dentist to take a risky moonshot in pursuit of excellence". Excellent comment.
I was aware as I was writing it that consistent mediocrity is indeed a profitable target. Perhaps we're quibbling over "mediocrity"? Staying within the spec seems enough of the challenge for a grid, I'm not sure that I'd define excellence as narrower and narrower variation around the spec there.
I was making a moral judgement in "unworthy". I like cars to come off the factory floor consistently good. I own a Tesla, this statement has high salience for me. That seems like a challenge. I wouldn't respect the Lada factory for consistently turning out cars that break down or fall apart, just as I don't respect McDonalds for consistently delivering underwhelming food. I acknowledge the consistency, I acknowledge it's profitable, but they're not achieving consistent greatness.