3 ms·

No it's about right and wrong. That's why software is fundamentally binary.

• james_s_tayler 8y ago
  That's what people make it about. It's classic misdirection. You know, the 20th century American sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein in his 1953 novel Assignment In Eternity wrote "man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal." And Aristotle said that man was a political animal. I deduce from that that "man is not a political animal; he is a politicizing animal." That's why we get arguments and debates around there subjects and they become so heated. The truth of the matter is the only way it's possible to compute the answer to any given programming debate is to implement all suggestions in parallel universes and see which one doesn't cause World Was III inadvertently. You can't compute the answer, so you go off hueristics of what's a) what's popular in the wider community (fashion) b) what's popular in your local community (politics) and c) what's popular with you (art). I need to write a full article on this viewpoint at some stage.
• quickthrower2 8y ago
  Who decides if something is right or wrong? Have you never heard a developer debating "is this a bug? is this a feature?"
• lemmsjid 8y ago
  Usually software design debates (such as this one) are not about the state of a software application right now (the 0's and 1's), but about how quickly it can change, how well it can be understood, and how amenable it is to debugging. None of those are binary concepts. Not to mention that software applications can have many states to reason about. And many (most?) applications are undecidable, and hence resistant to analytical closure.