Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!cbnewsh!gls
From: gls@odyssey.att.com (Col. G. L. Sicherman)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: the scientist and the engineer
Message-ID: <1991Jan26.210023.28534@cbnewsh.att.com>
Date: 26 Jan 91 21:00:23 GMT
References: <10061@as0c.sei.cmu.edu> <10185@as0c.sei.cmu.edu>
Sender: gls@cbnewsh.att.com (Col. G. L. Sicherman)
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Organization: Save the Dodoes Foundation
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In <10185@as0c.sei.cmu.edu>, rsd@sei.cmu.edu writes:
> 
> There is some confusion here between the roles of engineering and science.
> Science is discovery through hypothesis testing (in books, anyway, where
> serendipity is ignored); engineering fabricating from the known.  Engineers
> build what they already know how to build, with only small differences
> allowed between successive designs.  We would never award a contract to a
> engineering firm that has never build a bridge before.
> 
> However, we let programmers hack away at things they've never built before,
> on our money, and express surprise at the results.

Of course we do!  Why should I write the same program twice?  Once a program
works, everybody can use it; software can be copied.  But you can't copy a
bridge in shar format.  That's why construction workers mostly do old things
and we programmers mostly do new things.

This is also why managers who treat software as a manufacturing product go
wrong.  Mass manufacturing deals in repeated products--it rests on Baconian
science in its dependence on repeatability.  Software lies at the boundary
between order and chaos.  That's what it's for, so it *always* heads for
the boundary.  Software makes nonsense of mass markets and other anomalies
of print-age culture.  (And print-age culture interprets this phenomenon as
"transition to a service economy.")

In programming, software engineering cannot push back the boundary--it can
only modify its geometry.  The programmer's greater understanding informs
the program much as music informs a collection of notes.  When nobody
maintains your pencil sharpener, it works fine; when nobody takes *personal*
responsibility for a program, it soon rots.  And the rot is imponderable
to engineers, for they are trained to abstract the problem from the people.

-:-
	"The identical is equal to itself, since it is different."

					--Franco Spisani, _Philosophical
					  Foundations of Autogenetic Logic_
-- 
Col. G. L. Sicherman
gls@odyssey.att.COM