4 ms·
> I now think it’s madness for anyone to be in charge of anything if they don’t have relevant experience in the relevant domain. This. In support of that idea
by pjmorris 8y ago
> I now think it’s madness for anyone to be in charge of anything if they don’t have relevant experience in the relevant domain.
This.
In support of that idea, here's C.A.R. Hoare, from 'The Emperor's Old Clothes', the 1980 Turing Award lecture:
'At last, there breezed into my office the most
senior manager of all, a general manager of our parent
company, Andrew St. Johnston. I was surprised that he
had even heard of me. "You know what went wrong?"
he shouted--he always shouted-- "You let your programmers
do things which you yourself do not understand."
I stared in astonishment. He was obviously out
of touch with present day realities. How could one person
ever understand the whole of a modem software product
like the Elliott 503 Mark II software system?
I realized later that he was absolutely right; he had
diagnosed the true cause of the problem and he had
planted the seed of its later solution.'
- shshhdhs 8y agoWhat was the solution here? To learn the Elliott 503 Mark II more deeply?
- joel_ms 8y agoGiven the speaker, I'm guessing the suggestion is that the incident sowed the seed for him to develop Hoare Logic[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoare_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoare_logic
- pjmorris 8y agoOversimplifying, but quoting from the speech, that particular challenge was overcome as follows: "Thus we muddled through by common sense and compromise to something approaching success." He then discusses how the problems there led to his thinking on CSP, and, eventually, formal methods. But, go read the speech, it's much more wonderful than any summary thereof: http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs422/2010/bib/hoare81emperor.pdf http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs422/2010/bib/hoare81emperor...