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I wonder sometimes if this is the cause or effect of the lack of consensus in software engineering. There are so many topics about which the software engineerin
by zaphar 3y ago
I wonder sometimes if this is the cause or effect of the lack of consensus in software engineering. There are so many topics about which the software engineering community is somewhat split. Typechecked or not typechecked, SQL or Nosql, Object Oriented or Functional. The pendulum swings between them over time but no real established consensus get's established.
Is the lack of consensus why we don't have more curated knowledge? Or is the lack of curated knowledge the reason we don't have more consensus?
- billfruit 3y agoMore than that I feel there is hidden/lost knowledge. For example real world software design documents are so hard to come by, I think they must be one of the closest guarded things in software companies. The history of major software development projects in the industry has simply been lost to us.
- qznc 3y agoI’m pretty sure the main reasons such documents are not public are: Either nobody documented it or the document is badly written. So it is just too embarrassing.
- ta8645 3y ago> ...the document is badly written. So it is just too embarrassing. At risk of being accused of being on the A.I. hype train, it seems like having a writing bot that could distill the important points out of poorly written documents, and state them more clearly would be a huge boon. Hopefully it would allow an iterative process where someone could hone their offering to a point where they felt okay releasing it.
- layer8 3y agoFor software documentation, “badly written” often means that it’s ambiguous, is missing information, and/or is contradictory. AI can’t really help with that.
- ta8645 3y agoI would think that a good AI could actually point out missing and ambiguous information and allow an iterative process where a programmer could more easily fill in the blanks before resubmitting it for another round.
- tremon 3y agoIs "good AI" now the new "true Scotsman"?
- funcDropShadow 3y agoYou mean the "sufficiently smart compiler"?
- qznc 3y agoYes, ChatGPT is good enough to help writing this stuff. It is still work though. Work which is not valued much and which most engineers like to avoid. Personally, I like it. For me, there is no better way to achieve clarity than writing about something. So I don’t really understand why they like to avoid it. They apparently value clarity less than I do but that doesn’t explain it. “Everybody is different“ doesn’t really explain anything.
- darkerside 3y agoI feel confident that an AI trying to read that info back would suffer the same limitations as any human. What is important depends completely on the audience and why they are reading. The sum of all important points to all people at all times is equal to the content of the computer program itself.
- fabianholzer 3y agoI think every major split would still be a topic broad enough for a curated body of knowledge. Unfortunately, I think the author is spot on, with the answer to why we don't have such kinds of work available, as he writes: "the work is hard and unrewarding".
- gdulli 3y agoIt doesn't make sense to me that there should be consensus. People have diverse opinions and values, and these topics are highly situational and subjective rather than neatly, objectively, universally right or wrong.
- swayvil 3y agoIf there is nigh-unanimous agreement. Asserting the same narrative, arguing the same arguments. Well that's suspicious. That's a sign of something.
- justin66 3y agoIn other engineering disciplines, it means there are agreed upon engineering principles that practitioners are obligated to apply.
- gdulli 3y agoGood example of why "engineering" only works as a loose metaphor and isn't meaningfully similar enough with software for direct comparisons. Building things with matter needs to adhere to fixed principles corresponding to hard laws of physics. Working with bits is a different ballgame. It's creativity, psychology, improvisation. It's gardening.
- justin66 3y agoPhysics matters, but any engineering discipline dictates principles and practices beyond merely what is demanded by physics. > It's gardening. Let a thousand bad analogies bloom!
- iovrthoughtthis 3y agoimo we've not settled on a meta as the game is relatively new, has been changing a lot over the decades, they take a long time to play and lots of the learnings are fairly hidden in companies.