3 ms·

I'm skeptical about this "control by engineers = compatibility / standards compliance" conflation - it smells like an emotional association (control by engineer

I'm skeptical about this "control by engineers = compatibility / standards compliance" conflation - it smells like an emotional association (control by engineers is good, standards are good, therefore control by engineers must correlate with standards compliance). To me it seems just as likely that engineers, who often have strong opinions and dreams about creating frameworks etc. the way they think is right, could be more likely to feel stifled by having to conform to somebody else's standard, and prefer to go their own way.

TomOfTTB 16y ago
I generally find engineers to be more in favor of standards than anyone else but that's anecdotal. The point I was actually making is the engineers are told to "catch up as quickly as possible" which leads to standards compliance because you don't have time to reinvent the wheel. So it's not an emotional reaction or judgement call it's just pragmatism.
- contextfree 16y ago
  I'd distinguish between engineers who use the things that are/aren't standardized, and engineers who build them. The former often like standards because the pain of dealing with incompatibilities can overwhelm any possible advantage of doing things differently. The latter tend to have strong opinions about the technical details of what they're building, which may clash with what the standards dictate. Couple anecdotes: here's a quote from Richard Stallman: http://karmak.org/archive/2003/01/12-14-99.epl.html http://karmak.org/archive/2003/01/12-14-99.epl.html "Richard: Basically, my attitude towards standards is that they are useful. They help users figure out how to support a variety of systems, and then they help system implementors figure out how to give the users what the users will expect. But you shouldn't treat standards as though they were gods. There's no need to. We support standards in the ways that are useful to users, and we depart from them when that becomes more useful to users. ... It was already approved and we had already had a chance to object, so all I could do was make a comment. So I couldn't block approval of the standard because I was a voting member of the committee. I couldn't block approval of the standard on those grounds, so instead...I posted a notice about the coup in which the evil repressive forces of POSIX were being thrown off...To have an excuse to say that we still support the spec, if you define the environment variable, POSIX_ME_HARDER was the original way. Then a slightly prudish board member convinced me to change it to POSIXLY_CORRECT which I now think was a mistake. I should have left it as POSIX_ME_HARDER." It's interesting that IMO Stallman-the-politician (for me not a negative term, BTW) comes off as much more of a standards advocate than Stallman-the-engineer.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  > I generally find engineers to be more in favor of standards than anyone else I am an engineer and I am very skeptical about standards as in those ISO, ANSI, ECMA or IEEE publish, as they tend to get convoluted, all-encompassing and generally over-engineered. I am very happy with a no-strings-attached standard that someone somewhere published that makes sense and has wide adoption.

TomOfTTB 16y ago

I generally find engineers to be more in favor of standards than anyone else but that's anecdotal. The point I was actually making is the engineers are told to "catch up as quickly as possible" which leads to standards compliance because you don't have time to reinvent the wheel. So it's not an emotional reaction or judgement call it's just pragmatism.

contextfree 16y ago
I'd distinguish between engineers who use the things that are/aren't standardized, and engineers who build them. The former often like standards because the pain of dealing with incompatibilities can overwhelm any possible advantage of doing things differently. The latter tend to have strong opinions about the technical details of what they're building, which may clash with what the standards dictate. Couple anecdotes: here's a quote from Richard Stallman: http://karmak.org/archive/2003/01/12-14-99.epl.html http://karmak.org/archive/2003/01/12-14-99.epl.html "Richard: Basically, my attitude towards standards is that they are useful. They help users figure out how to support a variety of systems, and then they help system implementors figure out how to give the users what the users will expect. But you shouldn't treat standards as though they were gods. There's no need to. We support standards in the ways that are useful to users, and we depart from them when that becomes more useful to users. ... It was already approved and we had already had a chance to object, so all I could do was make a comment. So I couldn't block approval of the standard because I was a voting member of the committee. I couldn't block approval of the standard on those grounds, so instead...I posted a notice about the coup in which the evil repressive forces of POSIX were being thrown off...To have an excuse to say that we still support the spec, if you define the environment variable, POSIX_ME_HARDER was the original way. Then a slightly prudish board member convinced me to change it to POSIXLY_CORRECT which I now think was a mistake. I should have left it as POSIX_ME_HARDER." It's interesting that IMO Stallman-the-politician (for me not a negative term, BTW) comes off as much more of a standards advocate than Stallman-the-engineer.
rbanffy 16y ago
> I generally find engineers to be more in favor of standards than anyone else I am an engineer and I am very skeptical about standards as in those ISO, ANSI, ECMA or IEEE publish, as they tend to get convoluted, all-encompassing and generally over-engineered. I am very happy with a no-strings-attached standard that someone somewhere published that makes sense and has wide adoption.