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The material aspect is engineering. Is the logic engineering? Do you engineer logic? Would a mathematician think of contriving logic as engineering? In order t
by psyc 9y ago
The material aspect is engineering. Is the logic engineering? Do you engineer logic? Would a mathematician think of contriving logic as engineering?
In order to discuss categories at all, you have to place some limit on how far to stretch the equivalence of different things. Sure, a physical thing is transformable to a logical thing, but doesn't that affect our categories? We're pretty bad at finding or agreeing on the lines between the categories we create, so I don't worry about that much.
I didn't say that programming is never anything like engineering. I apply engineering-inspired approaches to my work all the time. But here's another perhaps eccentric opinion: when I'm thinking like an engineer, it's usually to compensate for the code being too complicated to read. I consider that a pragmatic response to a worrying failure, not something to aspire to more of.
- skookumchuck 9y ago> Do you engineer logic? You betcha. Think of how Woz designed a floppy disk controller that used fewer parts than other designs. That's engineering the logic. A big part of software engineering is to engineer the logic to get the correct result as fast as possible.
- bostik 9y ago> A big part of software engineering is to engineer the logic to get the correct result as fast as possible.* Engineering is all about working within a set of constraints. Things that are easier and/or cheaper to manufacture, have clearly been engineered that way. It can't be a coincidence that we consider CPU time and memory footprint "costs".
- skookumchuck 9y agoWe consider them costs because they are. If you can execute code on your server farm 1% faster, you can save millions of dollars in server costs. Hence software engineers who work on server farm code tend to get paid very well.