Besides the question of whether the Fibonacci sequence is a good or bad example, here’s a different objection to the author’s thesis: If software development i

Besides the question of whether the Fibonacci sequence is a good or bad example, here’s a different objection to the author’s thesis: If software development is ripe for a mathematics-driven leap forward, just like logistics and baseball, why hasn’t it happened yet? If software developers and baseball coaches were both sitting next to low-hanging fruit that merely required a bit of mathematical knowledge and spreadsheet-wrangling to exploit, I would have expected the people already using computers -- the software developers -- to find it first. What’s different, and why? It could be that software is inherently less amenable to statistical and numeric approaches than baseball, and that’s just the way it is. When you look at baseball the right way, you have a great mass of data with fairly simple and consistent rules, ideal for a statistical approach. When you look at a typical software system, you have a mass of special-case business logic, with no real simplifying assumption to be found. In cases where “big data” is available, successful companies are using statistics to exploit regularities in the system. So maybe what the author is arguing for is already happening, albeit on an somewhat smaller and slower scale, and maybe this is inherent in the nature of software. Applied mathematics, basically calculus, is great but it can’t do everything. The author seems to be ignoring discrete mathematics (which a lot of the “Lisp hacks” he dismisses would fall under). Then there are sociological issues, such as documentation, unit testing, debugging, modularity, maintenance of legacy systems. Plenty of researchers have tried applying a data-driven approach to testing and debugging, and I think it’s safe to say no-one has completely cracked it yet. If another recent paper posted here is to be believed, we don’t even know if there’s a significant difference in bug rates between static and dynamic typing.