> Huh? Science is the quintessence of iterating "until something works" It is not enough in science to prove that something works, you must also prove that it

> Huh? Science is the quintessence of iterating "until something works" It is not enough in science to prove that something works, you must also prove that it is correct. That is why in mathematics, even though we believe something to be true through intuition, it is still simply conjecture until we have a rigorous proof. We may even call it a theory if we can observe it with a high degree of certainty. Science is effective because we pay attention to correctness at every level, slowly building understanding in an iterative fashion. The only assumptions we make are at the level of axioms. The current state of programming makes no claims about the overall correctness of a program. We may write tests about various subsystems, and increase our chances that a system will behave as we expect, but a rigorous proof of correctness, or even something close to a proof of correctness, is still a fantasy. > Science is exactly the turning away from a "first principles" approach Science is a from first principles approach. Invention is not necessarily scientific. > And of course in Software, the "first principles" approach was what we successfully overcame with agile approaches that stress quick feedback loops Agile has nothing to do with software correctness. It's a methodology for gathering and executing on requirements and constraints. What I'm talking about is ensuring a program behaves in a way we can reason about mathmatically.