5 ms·

This is nice but it's also nonsense. Nether a program nor a poem is easily tractable. A change in one place requires rebalancing elsewhere. We try and minimise

• rw 18y ago
  What sad language do you use? :(
  • glymor 18y ago
    I assume OS/360 was written in assembler so it would have been even more true for Fred Brooks. Except he had his crazy crap about being the "surgeon" only writing specs and leaving the team to the lesser work so that might explain his viewpoint.
    • cubicle67 18y ago
      I think you may be wrong on the job of the surgeon. I've loaned my copy to someone at the moment, but from memory the surgeon considered to be the most skilled member of the team and was given the most difficult work. Classifying this as 'only writing specs' is disingenuous.
      • 10ren 18y ago
        I agree it wasn't just "writing specs", but I think the parent meant that the surgeon could offload the lesser repetitive work. I think it was more about removing distractions. IIRC I think there was a "tools specialist" on the surgeon team. I find writing tools to support my work very helpful; and they are interesting, challenging and rewarding to write, but they do take headspace away from the main task. I think this is the idea of the surgeon team. There was also a documenter; which is also very helpful but difficult to do well. I'm not sure why this never took off (wrong ratios? people don't get along? communicating with the team is itself adds too much overhead? the surgeon's work is too raw for that support?), but I find it helpful to think in terms of these roles within myself.
• 10ren 18y ago
  Tractable compared with non-thought stuff - try reworking wood or metal. But you're right that it's impossible to eliminate all dependencies, and a large interdependent structure becomes tedious, and scary, to change. "Throw one away", Brooks even admitted (if you can.) Alan Turing predicted that programming need never become boring because you can automate the mechanical aspects. If it really is repetitive, you can automate it. One can also make small tools that are useful to others. e.g. I got a thrill even from a trivial script to automate away a tedious step, when other people used it. I don't believe in a personal god but I respect people, like Knuth and Fred Brooks, who do. If they think a tree is designed, I'm happy to think of the intrinsic beauty of a tree - and of all nature. I couldn't make any of it. It's surprisingly renewing to spend some time in nature.
  • glymor 18y ago
    Perhaps I wasn't clear. I wasn't refering to whether God designs. I was refering to the differences in each snowfake or leaf being of random source that is what I meant by "each".
    • 10ren 18y ago
      Oh, you mean they aren't individually designed (without commenting on whether the process that generates them is designed or not); and the variations in each one (that snowflakes are the canonical example of) are just random fluctuations. The beauty comes from the process, not the randomness. I see what you mean. I think taking a personal God point of view, one would say that those random fluctuations are not random, but designed; just as each individual person is a real textured thing. Every individual is more than a mere variation on a platonic theme. My own tendency is think that when we don't understand something, it's easiest to model it as random; but whether it really is random is something we don't know. So I'm with Einstein in the "god does not play dice with the universe" on this one. BTW: on a separate note, I'm concerned about you. Having a project canceled is very distressing. The last time I heard someone talking like this (an editor at my publisher, who just had an important proposal knocked back), they committed suicide a couple of weeks later. I sensed something was a little odd, but I didn't do anything. Please, if you are feeling low, ring one of those suicide helplines. I'll be very relieved if you do (or if I'm ridiculously off-base, even more so).
• cubicle67 18y ago
  perhaps programming is not for you?
  • deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
• visitor4rmindia 18y ago
  >The "pleasure of making things that are useful to other people" only happens if you project isn't cancelled and actually gets used. Outside of a startup this confluence of events is heartbreakingly rare. Why would a company pay you if no one uses your work? If I worked on stuff that kept getting cancelled or not used I'd figure the company was going to go belly up sometime soon!
• ojbyrne 18y ago
  As an aside, you seem to be suggesting Wordsworth << Tennyson. Perhaps you can make a case for that, but I don't agree myself. Just an aside.
  • glymor 18y ago
    I was using Wordsworth as a proxy for Romantic poetry, which I consider to be (as a whole) overly-flowerly and trite. The article stuck me the same way. I don't rank Tennyson much as a poet. The inequality would hold on their performance as Poet Laureate though.
    • ojbyrne 18y ago
      And I've always thought of the Victorians as overly mannered and reactionary. But I respect our differences of opinion.
• koningrobot 18y ago
  The "pleasure of making things that are useful to other people" only happens if you project isn't cancelled and actually gets used. It also doesn't happen if you're developing internal software that other people will be forced to use. It all gets decided by your bosses and their bosses, without any of the hands-on people (developers and users) having any say in the what and the how. And so you end up having to watch how bad decisions and faulty prioritizations from above ruin the users' morale, sanity, wrists and lives. And your empathy will do the same to you. I know, I know, this isn't true for everyone, but think of how much better and cheaper technology could be if techies and users talked directly instead of through two layers of middlemen. Techies don't need middlemen to talk to users, unless the users are represented by middlemen.