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Earlier he had noted that engineering is informed by science, so not sure why he thinks it ironic. The science behind engineering disciplines is orders of magni
by eternalban 5y ago
Earlier he had noted that engineering is informed by science, so not sure why he thinks it ironic. The science behind engineering disciplines is orders of magnitude more developed than the science informing writing software.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoYup. It's just applied X. Mathematicians create the theories, engineers use the theories to create the tools, developers use the tools to create the products (roughly).
- pjmorris 5y agoI added his parenthetical comment. I think he means, for example, that we could probably do better than vi, emacs, VS Code, or even IntelliJ for supporting our thinking as we write software.
- eternalban 5y agoSure, but how? If there is an effective path to higher dimensional thinking and expression of code (beyond text, even structured text) to date it has eluded us. We need breakthroughs in the science of software.
- infinite8s 5y agoIf you were to build a complex distributed system, there are no tools to help model it short of building it. This is vastly different than, for example, building a bridge, where we can use math and science encoded into computational processes to be able to model a bridge and then simulate it's behavior under varying conditions. Same with most other fields of science and engineering that are starting to leverage computing.
- mbrodersen 5y agoIt would be nice if Alan Kay actually backup up his bold claims by building software demonstrating it. Lost of talk, not much walking.