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At least with technology, someone somewhere understood what is going on. With biology/biochem/physics all the way down... there is no expert who designed the sy

by criley 14y ago

At least with technology, someone somewhere understood what is going on. With biology/biochem/physics all the way down... there is no expert who designed the system originally! Can you imagine computer science if we had no prior knowledge of computers and had to research the entire process starting at the end point? What a task.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- emiljbs 14y ago
  Pretty sure it's "to my religious views" If you're gonna make a bad joke then at least you should learn something from it ;-)
raelshark 14y ago
It never really occurred to me that natural science is an effort to reverse-engineer the universe.
- randomdrake 14y ago
  "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." -Carl Sagan
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
sanderjd 14y ago
> someone somewhere understood what is going on. Not quite. A huge group of someones in aggregate understood what is going on. There is still no single expert who designed the system originally. Eventually, or perhaps already in many cases, some portion of the system has no living expert who designed it. I can imagine a future where expertise on some deep components of the system has been lost to the sands of time, and people have to study them blindly to determine their function in just the same way that we currently study nature. Neat. edit: I think raelshark and Carl Sagan said it better than I did.
- tadfisher 14y ago
  In Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep he describes the role of the programmer-archaeologist, whose job is to sift through mountains of abstraction layers and black-box code modules written in dead languages thousands of years prior, determine their function, and stitch them together to perform a desired function. In the prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, one of these modules, buried beneath said layers, contains a booby-trap set by an ancient civilization that only the protagonist knows about. I believe the Unix epoch is mentioned briefly.
  - kiba 14y ago
    Why don't they just code new software from scratch?
    - hornbaker 14y ago
      Because GitHub.
    - tadfisher 14y ago
      It's a logical continuance of the current state of affairs. Even in the early 90s when these books were written, few people wrote entire applications in assembly language, or punched machine code into cards; they wrote in a higher-level languages that are eventually compiled into machine code, or were interpreted by other tools of which they know nothing about the internal workings. Hell, we are inventing entire languages today that compile to Javascript, which in turn is interpreted or JIT-compiled by other tools. Or we write advanced HTML5 frontends that talk to advanced Node.js backends that in turn talk to legacy systems written in COBOL running on IBM mainframes. Programmer-archaeologists already exist.
  - cpeterso 14y ago
    In the book, all time is measured in seconds since the epoch, because days and years have no meaning for an interstellar civilization. But the programmer-archaeologists believe the Unix epoch is when humans first landed on Earth's moon. :)
nbashaw 14y ago
You just missed the whole point of the article. No one, nowhere fully understands how technology like a computer works. That's because it's possible to design systems on top of systems without fully understanding the nuances of all the dependencies.
- criley 14y ago
  Actually, you missed the point of my post. I never meant to imply that one person understood the whole technology system (that's truly absurd), rather that each individual component was designed and implemented intentionally and it's likely that each niche in the industry had at least one person who truly understood it. Now, take that paradigm and compare it to natural science: No one anywhere ever had any understanding of the system, and now we look at the end result of a constantly changing system and try to ascertain everything from how it works today to how it all began. I apologize, I could have been more clear in my original post, sorry!
snowwrestler 14y ago
I think it's likely that what we now call computer science will end up being essential to understanding the systems of the universe...it just so happens that we are using computers to discover it, like previous investigators used weighted balls, inclined planes, or chemicals.

by criley 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

emiljbs 14y ago
Pretty sure it's "to my religious views" If you're gonna make a bad joke then at least you should learn something from it ;-)

raelshark 14y ago

It never really occurred to me that natural science is an effort to reverse-engineer the universe.

randomdrake 14y ago
"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." -Carl Sagan
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

sanderjd 14y ago

> someone somewhere understood what is going on. Not quite. A huge group of someones in aggregate understood what is going on. There is still no single expert who designed the system originally. Eventually, or perhaps already in many cases, some portion of the system has no living expert who designed it. I can imagine a future where expertise on some deep components of the system has been lost to the sands of time, and people have to study them blindly to determine their function in just the same way that we currently study nature. Neat. edit: I think raelshark and Carl Sagan said it better than I did.

tadfisher 14y ago
In Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep he describes the role of the programmer-archaeologist, whose job is to sift through mountains of abstraction layers and black-box code modules written in dead languages thousands of years prior, determine their function, and stitch them together to perform a desired function. In the prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, one of these modules, buried beneath said layers, contains a booby-trap set by an ancient civilization that only the protagonist knows about. I believe the Unix epoch is mentioned briefly.
- kiba 14y ago
  Why don't they just code new software from scratch?
  - hornbaker 14y ago
    Because GitHub.
  - tadfisher 14y ago
    It's a logical continuance of the current state of affairs. Even in the early 90s when these books were written, few people wrote entire applications in assembly language, or punched machine code into cards; they wrote in a higher-level languages that are eventually compiled into machine code, or were interpreted by other tools of which they know nothing about the internal workings. Hell, we are inventing entire languages today that compile to Javascript, which in turn is interpreted or JIT-compiled by other tools. Or we write advanced HTML5 frontends that talk to advanced Node.js backends that in turn talk to legacy systems written in COBOL running on IBM mainframes. Programmer-archaeologists already exist.
- cpeterso 14y ago
  In the book, all time is measured in seconds since the epoch, because days and years have no meaning for an interstellar civilization. But the programmer-archaeologists believe the Unix epoch is when humans first landed on Earth's moon. :)

nbashaw 14y ago

You just missed the whole point of the article. No one, nowhere fully understands how technology like a computer works. That's because it's possible to design systems on top of systems without fully understanding the nuances of all the dependencies.

criley 14y ago
Actually, you missed the point of my post. I never meant to imply that one person understood the whole technology system (that's truly absurd), rather that each individual component was designed and implemented intentionally and it's likely that each niche in the industry had at least one person who truly understood it. Now, take that paradigm and compare it to natural science: No one anywhere ever had any understanding of the system, and now we look at the end result of a constantly changing system and try to ascertain everything from how it works today to how it all began. I apologize, I could have been more clear in my original post, sorry!

snowwrestler 14y ago

I think it's likely that what we now call computer science will end up being essential to understanding the systems of the universe...it just so happens that we are using computers to discover it, like previous investigators used weighted balls, inclined planes, or chemicals.