4 ms·

I say this as someone who loves software: software is not special. Every discipline has infinite depth. Railways in 2D may seem simple but there the simplicit

by callc 2y ago

I say this as someone who loves software: software is not special. Every discipline has infinite depth. Railways in 2D may seem simple but there the simplicity may be intentional. Just like when you write software that runs things like planes, trains, or medical devices, all of a sudden you’re writing in C, without recursion, without function pointers, without using the heap, etc. Look at the concord airplane. A mess of a project. Look at anything in biology and human health. The complexity is unimaginable compared to software. Edit: reduced emotions

antoniojtorres 2y ago
I don’t think the comment was meant derisive like you and the other commenter are interpreting… relax?
- callc 2y ago
  Thanks, I edited to assume the best interpretation of the thread. Since I want programming to be inclusive and not have a bad rap publicly, when a peer says “software is better than all other disciplines because of X, Y, Z” I want to convince them otherwise. As a leader and teacher with more grey hair every day, I feel this responsibility
  - noosphr 2y ago
    >As a leader and teacher with more grey hair every day, I feel this responsibility You should probably do less of that since: 1). That's not what any of my posts said. 2). My degree says mathematical physics and not computer science or software engineering. 3). A field where you're tone policed by the tone deaf is the opposite of welcoming and inclusive.
    - lovich 2y ago
      Since I’m already in the thread defending you against the other poster, I’ll add here U/callc appears to be reacting to the public perception of how this thread would read externally, you appear to be reacting based on hard logic, which is unpalatable to most of the public. I think you two are talking past each other
      - buzzardbait 2y ago
        > I think you two are talking past each other This is why steelmanning a comment before arguing against it should be a rule.
lovich 2y ago
> I say this as someone who loves software: software is not special. Based on your comment I’m interpreting “special” as “better”, or “harder”. I interpreted the comment you replying to as software is “special” as in it is “different” and the differences require different solutions than other fields have. Like when I talk to my civil engineer friends I only on the surface comprehend what they are dealing with when they need to move literal thousands of tons of mass. I can try and make an analogy to my own experience with bandwidth and memory, but nothing will be a 1:1 comparison with the amount of energy used when the physical mass of the entire internet is within an order of magnitude of a strawberry. Simultaneously my civil engineers friends don’t have to deal with a situation of one of their apprentices making a logical mistake based on a single missed `!` and their features suddenly using up 100% of all resources everywhere
bigtunacan 2y ago
Not op, but I'm clearly reading their message differently than you. Any type of physical engineering is based on hard facts, data, and well established historical research, mathematics, and more. I've seen many an electrical engineer say, "fuck it, this is too hard and pays too little" and so they pivoted into software engineering quite easily. On the other hand I've never seen the opposite. Real engineering is hard because you actually have to get shit perfect. The wrong o rings and real people die. There are a few real software engineering shops and real software engineers, but 90% are just slinging shit together for a bunch of enterprise CRUD and they are all just one bad deploy away from disaster.
- callc 2y ago
  How are you reading noosphr’s comments? I read it as: “software is special because its design space is high dimensional, compared to all other engineering disciplines which are limited to 3 spatial dimensions. Large design space leads to ability to mess things up.” I wholeheartedly agree with you: “real” engineering (where lives are on the line) is hard. Most software that is made is not to control pace makers, air plane autopilot, space shuttles, etc. When we do need to program in these life and death situations, we should look carefully at the real engineers that do this all the time (looking at you self-driving car software).
  - bigtunacan 2y ago
    Software "design space is high dimensional" is true in that storage, latencies, processors, memory we just keep growing and growing. Given that, software should be faster and better than ever because the dimension where software lives has gotten exponentially larger and more performant. Rather than use that like responsible engineers we all started writing bloatware because it was easy and we could get away with it. Engineering with constraints builds discipline. Maybe we are lacking as engineers in software because the constraint bar just continues to raise.
    - vacuity 2y ago
      The power of software is not tied to processing power or memory, although those help a lot. Code is the deciding factor, not quite because it can be laid out wherever and have far reaching effects, but for the underlying basis for code. Software is all about leaky abstractions. It's not quite math or any sort of empirical engineering. Software models entire worlds. Excel is "just" people churning out calculations from paper spreadsheets, except now you just see the results on a screen. Pong is a ping-pong game. But I used the word "leaky" before. "All models are wrong, but some are useful." We could always talk about stacks, AVL trees, or NLP before any meaningful conception of computers, and indeed a lot of computer science research happened when computers were still fairly primitive. Computer science and its applied form, software engineering, are about computation (data and code) and abstraction. Even computation is just a distraction at some level. There's some world with the ideal behavior that a program should abstract from, but an ideal is an ideal, so programming is often floundering to figure out what ad-hoc world the program mirrors and tweaking haphazardly. Software engineering isn't engineering not because it can't be, due to the (very real) differences of software from the physical world. It isn't engineering currently because we aren't taking control of our actions and their consequences, in all senses. Intellectual superiority is not relevant here. Everyone has hard tasks. If you're a civil engineer, then design and build infrastructure well. If you're a programmer, then design and build programs well. Any discipline demands honesty and forthrightness in evaluating its work.

by callc 2y ago

antoniojtorres 2y ago

I don’t think the comment was meant derisive like you and the other commenter are interpreting… relax?

callc 2y ago
Thanks, I edited to assume the best interpretation of the thread. Since I want programming to be inclusive and not have a bad rap publicly, when a peer says “software is better than all other disciplines because of X, Y, Z” I want to convince them otherwise. As a leader and teacher with more grey hair every day, I feel this responsibility
- noosphr 2y ago
  >As a leader and teacher with more grey hair every day, I feel this responsibility You should probably do less of that since: 1). That's not what any of my posts said. 2). My degree says mathematical physics and not computer science or software engineering. 3). A field where you're tone policed by the tone deaf is the opposite of welcoming and inclusive.
  - lovich 2y ago
    Since I’m already in the thread defending you against the other poster, I’ll add here U/callc appears to be reacting to the public perception of how this thread would read externally, you appear to be reacting based on hard logic, which is unpalatable to most of the public. I think you two are talking past each other
    - buzzardbait 2y ago
      > I think you two are talking past each other This is why steelmanning a comment before arguing against it should be a rule.

lovich 2y ago

> I say this as someone who loves software: software is not special. Based on your comment I’m interpreting “special” as “better”, or “harder”. I interpreted the comment you replying to as software is “special” as in it is “different” and the differences require different solutions than other fields have. Like when I talk to my civil engineer friends I only on the surface comprehend what they are dealing with when they need to move literal thousands of tons of mass. I can try and make an analogy to my own experience with bandwidth and memory, but nothing will be a 1:1 comparison with the amount of energy used when the physical mass of the entire internet is within an order of magnitude of a strawberry. Simultaneously my civil engineers friends don’t have to deal with a situation of one of their apprentices making a logical mistake based on a single missed `!` and their features suddenly using up 100% of all resources everywhere

bigtunacan 2y ago

Not op, but I'm clearly reading their message differently than you. Any type of physical engineering is based on hard facts, data, and well established historical research, mathematics, and more. I've seen many an electrical engineer say, "fuck it, this is too hard and pays too little" and so they pivoted into software engineering quite easily. On the other hand I've never seen the opposite. Real engineering is hard because you actually have to get shit perfect. The wrong o rings and real people die. There are a few real software engineering shops and real software engineers, but 90% are just slinging shit together for a bunch of enterprise CRUD and they are all just one bad deploy away from disaster.

callc 2y ago
How are you reading noosphr’s comments? I read it as: “software is special because its design space is high dimensional, compared to all other engineering disciplines which are limited to 3 spatial dimensions. Large design space leads to ability to mess things up.” I wholeheartedly agree with you: “real” engineering (where lives are on the line) is hard. Most software that is made is not to control pace makers, air plane autopilot, space shuttles, etc. When we do need to program in these life and death situations, we should look carefully at the real engineers that do this all the time (looking at you self-driving car software).
- bigtunacan 2y ago
  Software "design space is high dimensional" is true in that storage, latencies, processors, memory we just keep growing and growing. Given that, software should be faster and better than ever because the dimension where software lives has gotten exponentially larger and more performant. Rather than use that like responsible engineers we all started writing bloatware because it was easy and we could get away with it. Engineering with constraints builds discipline. Maybe we are lacking as engineers in software because the constraint bar just continues to raise.
  - vacuity 2y ago
    The power of software is not tied to processing power or memory, although those help a lot. Code is the deciding factor, not quite because it can be laid out wherever and have far reaching effects, but for the underlying basis for code. Software is all about leaky abstractions. It's not quite math or any sort of empirical engineering. Software models entire worlds. Excel is "just" people churning out calculations from paper spreadsheets, except now you just see the results on a screen. Pong is a ping-pong game. But I used the word "leaky" before. "All models are wrong, but some are useful." We could always talk about stacks, AVL trees, or NLP before any meaningful conception of computers, and indeed a lot of computer science research happened when computers were still fairly primitive. Computer science and its applied form, software engineering, are about computation (data and code) and abstraction. Even computation is just a distraction at some level. There's some world with the ideal behavior that a program should abstract from, but an ideal is an ideal, so programming is often floundering to figure out what ad-hoc world the program mirrors and tweaking haphazardly. Software engineering isn't engineering not because it can't be, due to the (very real) differences of software from the physical world. It isn't engineering currently because we aren't taking control of our actions and their consequences, in all senses. Intellectual superiority is not relevant here. Everyone has hard tasks. If you're a civil engineer, then design and build infrastructure well. If you're a programmer, then design and build programs well. Any discipline demands honesty and forthrightness in evaluating its work.