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This may be, but it is useful to point out that, in many cases, engineering practices in more tangible scientific areas are also driven by some personal prefere
by chaxor 4y ago
This may be, but it is useful to point out that, in many cases, engineering practices in more tangible scientific areas are also driven by some personal preferences / opinion.
For example, in which situations should you use Redlich-Kwong equations of state over a simple ideal gas or VdW? There will always be one model which gets closer to the measured values in a specific condition, but the entire domain may be difficult to determine which model is most appropriate.
Even in these fields the decision falls to opinion - some models may be more precise and accurate, but require more processing/ development time. Which is just software engineering again.
- qsort 4y agoMy previous comment came out harsher than I intended -- I don't mean to imply that opinion and experience don't play a factor in other disciplines, we are more prone to see issues with software engineering because we are more familiar with software engineering. However I still think the situation is a bit worse. The tradeoffs in the models you mention are well understood. The equivalent in SE would be something like "should we use python or go", but it's very unclear that we can definitively state which use cases are better for which. There is simply no evidence, the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data".