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That's why I mentioned librarians. Professional catalogers have spent over a century trying to figure out how to organize resources so that people doing researc

That's why I mentioned librarians. Professional catalogers have spent over a century trying to figure out how to organize resources so that people doing research can find relevant information, and classifications that are useful for everyone prove surprisingly elusive. The Dewey Decimal system is from the 1870s, after all. (Its flaws are well-known, now, and there are several other cataloging systems in use.) I was thinking about a quote (I think it's from Philip Greenspun or Joe Armstrong, though in ten minutes of googling I wasn't able to source it. Anyone?) observing that programming seems to be in a pre-scientific phase (in the Kuhn-ian sense) -- there still isn't a broad consensus about major ideas, so advances often come via books and manifestos, rather than gradually through organized research. (Edit: The closest match I'm getting is regarding AI. I've been reading about Prolog, so that might be where I read the quote...)

joe_the_user 17y ago
Hmm, The thing is that the phrase "pre-scientific" implies that CS is destined to reach a scientific phase. I don't know if that's at all certain. ... Another thing, just to think about, is how Google today often lets one find more cross-links than any hierarchical system would allow you to find, yet Google is, itself, not a well defined system using the semantics of the items involved but rather a "dumb" algorithm that only looks at the links between things...
- jerf 17y ago
  I don't know if programming (as opposed to computer science, in the research sense) will ever attain "science" status because we don't stay in one place long enough to be settled. If we were all still writing terminal apps on 80x25 green screens, the science would be pretty well settled on how to do that by now, with recipes for every occurrence that any normal programmer would ever hit readily available, and easy access to people who could do the somewhat harder cases. "What about the really hard cases?" you might ask, and the entire point of my hypothetical is that if we can't do it in 80x25, we don't do it.... and the contrast to the real world where we kept going is exactly my point. So, when will programming finally stabilize enough to become a science? I don't know, but I don't see it even in the long term (30+ years).

joe_the_user 17y ago

Hmm, The thing is that the phrase "pre-scientific" implies that CS is destined to reach a scientific phase. I don't know if that's at all certain. ... Another thing, just to think about, is how Google today often lets one find more cross-links than any hierarchical system would allow you to find, yet Google is, itself, not a well defined system using the semantics of the items involved but rather a "dumb" algorithm that only looks at the links between things...

jerf 17y ago
I don't know if programming (as opposed to computer science, in the research sense) will ever attain "science" status because we don't stay in one place long enough to be settled. If we were all still writing terminal apps on 80x25 green screens, the science would be pretty well settled on how to do that by now, with recipes for every occurrence that any normal programmer would ever hit readily available, and easy access to people who could do the somewhat harder cases. "What about the really hard cases?" you might ask, and the entire point of my hypothetical is that if we can't do it in 80x25, we don't do it.... and the contrast to the real world where we kept going is exactly my point. So, when will programming finally stabilize enough to become a science? I don't know, but I don't see it even in the long term (30+ years).