5 ms·

This sounds like Engineering, but be aware that in mechanical engineering the requirements are well-defined for materials and load. Consider the famous bridge r

This sounds like Engineering, but be aware that in mechanical engineering the requirements are well-defined for materials and load. Consider the famous bridge resonance problem and you will see why wind resonance is now a required subject for structural engineering. ME has an advantage over CSE in this regard because in CS the requirements are usually very poorly stated. About the best and most rigorous requirements you get are from mathematicans, but most devs and managers now certainly view that as wasting resources. To make not to fine a point of this, I always like to turn to Alan Kay's comparison: TCP/IP vs the web. When was the last time any human technology like TCP/IP scaled so well and so invisibly, it's like air we breathe without even thinking about it. The web in contrast was the work of rank amateurs. Alas, mathematics is really the "good enough" standard we in CS should strive for just like physics is the "good enough" standard behind ME and EE. Unfortunately as CS opened to the mainstream, I think a deep fear of mathematics led us to view this as "over engineering" even when it wasn't. The results are that the majority of the web is woefully underengineered, requiring far more money and time for inferior products. We know they are inferior, because even the simplest gui application has more consistency than a web variation of it. And that's what marketing constantly compares things too when they can't understand why the web sucks as much as it does. "Good Enough"? Please! For the last 20 years we haven't even come close!

nostrademons 12y ago
It's interesting that you mention TCP/IP, because that's the most famous example of a technology that "works in practice, but not in theory". Take a look at Van Jacobsen's presentation on the history of ARPANET: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCZMoY3q2uM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCZMoY3q2uM Packet switching was "utter heresy" (20m in) when it was invented. It "wasn't a network, it was an inefficient way to use an existing network". And it almost collapsed 25 years after it was invented; the presenter is famous for inventing the modern TCP/IP congestion control that saved the Internet [1]. The TCP/IP flow congestion algorithm has been redesigned several times since [2]. It works not because it was designed well, but because it wasn't designed and instead evolved over many years with many contributions from people devoted to keeping it working. Alan Kay is usually who I think of for great ideas that "work in theory, but not in practice". He's done some crucially important work in OOP, programming languages, and GUIs. But note that we don't actually use SmallTalk; instead we got C++ and Java. Nor do we use Dynabooks and Altos; instead, we got Microsoft Windows. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Jacobson#Career http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Jacobson#Career [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion-avoidance_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion-avoidance_algori...
- coldnebo 12y ago
  Good points. We might be focusing on different evidence for good design. Certainly a system has to be tested -- the theory is not enough. But areas of TCP that were designed up front were things like being able to carry arbitrary payloads, including itself! This is what makes ssh and vpns possible. By contrast, many web protocols break when tunneling: soap within soap. Also, for those unfamiliar with the actual process of protocol development back in those days, it was a wire protocol, which meant formal modeling and testing. Sure, it doesnt catch everything, but the web is far less formal. For example, the w3c originally said it wasn't going to provide an XML parser reference implementation because any graduate student should be able to code it up in two weeks. WTH?! While I don't doubt that is true, in practice it has meant that dozens of slightly different parsers were written, leading to hundreds of slightly different incompatibilities. Anyone who has had to integrate two different XML stacks will know. I use Ruby, which was inspired by smalltalk; modern Java is also becoming much more functional. In some ways, it has taken the larger community 20 years to understand Kay's vision. Also, he always said that the systems he worked on were prototypes -- he's commented before that he fully expected real-world systems to have surpased his long ago. But now we have Ruby, Node and Rust. Even Java and Spring.io have dramatically reshaped things towards a "smalltalkish" future. So I still put a lot of weight behind some of Kay's observations of the industry.
olavk 12y ago
The web might have been created by amateurs, but it works incredibly well. Sure, we have browser incompatibilities and whatnot, but this is an effect of having multiple independent implementations of the standards, which is part of what makes the web work in the first place.
- coldnebo 12y ago
  no, it doesn't. Having multiple independent implementations is a PITA, but that's why you have testing & validation labs along with standards. Take windows graphics driver labs... They test for pixel perfect compliance of output across hundreds of vendor implementations. Contrast that to the web where it took a separate group outside the w3c to embarrass browsers with the ACID2&3 tests. Now separate browsers look a lot closer in output. Devs are trying to fix these ecosystems: why does react use a virtual dom? Why do we need css resets? Why do we need js shims and polyfills? Because its the only way to come close to normalizing the platform. But have you ever wondered why you expect no two browsers display the same image? Postscript met that bar and is just as old as the web. Why didn't the w3c base the web on device independent coordinates instead of this confusing and unpredicatble layering of partial scalars and "angle subtended by a pixel on a 96dpi surface at a nominal arms length from the surface" crap? No one could have made a reference implementation off those requirements, much less a consistent verification & validation suite. And no offense to TBL, but HTTP didn't even survive first contact with netscape's vision of shopping carts. Cookies? An elegant solution? Or simple a new hell of tunneling client/server state over a supposedly stateless protocol. HTTPS everywhere requires long lived sessions as the basis?!? No wonder people are heading towards web sockets, etc. webapps are client/server apps -- HTTP was always grossly misapplied to them. Webdev is hard, not because I'm building beatiful bridges in the sky that are "good enough" poetic balances of constraints while coming in on time and on budget... Webdev is hard because of all the underlying assumptions I constantly have to check and recheck because I can't rely on them as an ME would (or hell, even as a backend J2EE engineer would). This is why some of us lament that people don't know the stack all the way down, because we have to in order to solve real problems. Every abstraction leaks, but hell, web abstractions are flipping sieves! No, the thing that "works incredibly well" is not the web, but whats under it that lets us make so very many mistakes and yet keep on trucking.
vonmoltke 12y ago
Alas, mathematics is really the "good enough" standard we in CS should strive for just like physics is the "good enough" standard behind ME and EE. Unfortunately as CS opened to the mainstream, I think a deep fear of mathematics led us to view this as "over engineering" even when it wasn't. The results are that the majority of the web is woefully underengineered, requiring far more money and time for inferior products. As I have stated multiple times in the past, I think the crux of the problem is that software is an immature field that needs to stratify into a proper engineering discipline as it matures. Computer science should be the "good enough" standard behind software engineering. "Computer scientists" should not be the ones actually implementing software systems any more than physicists should be the ones designing cam shafts or laying out circuit boards. The opening to the mainstream you refer to illustrates the problem. The people in the mainstream should not be studying computer science, and what they practice should not be called such. They are the engineers, technicians, and mechanics of software; they are not the physicists. Forcing all of these strata into the same bucket is doing more harm than good at this point and is likely hampering the field's drive to mature.
- engi_nerd 12y ago
  What would software programming look like as a true engineering discipline?
  - rjbwork 12y ago
    (my bias as a C# dev will show here) Most likely a professional association, with a test you have to take to call yourself a software engineer demonstrating basic competency in a couple of paradigms, and a rudimentary knowledge of patterns and practices. It's 2015, there's no reason that anyone should be writing Big Object Oriented Code, without practicing dependency injection, basic mocking and testing, and other modern development principles. And yet, here we are, with millions to billions of lines of terrible new code written every year.

nostrademons 12y ago

It's interesting that you mention TCP/IP, because that's the most famous example of a technology that "works in practice, but not in theory". Take a look at Van Jacobsen's presentation on the history of ARPANET: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCZMoY3q2uM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCZMoY3q2uM Packet switching was "utter heresy" (20m in) when it was invented. It "wasn't a network, it was an inefficient way to use an existing network". And it almost collapsed 25 years after it was invented; the presenter is famous for inventing the modern TCP/IP congestion control that saved the Internet [1]. The TCP/IP flow congestion algorithm has been redesigned several times since [2]. It works not because it was designed well, but because it wasn't designed and instead evolved over many years with many contributions from people devoted to keeping it working. Alan Kay is usually who I think of for great ideas that "work in theory, but not in practice". He's done some crucially important work in OOP, programming languages, and GUIs. But note that we don't actually use SmallTalk; instead we got C++ and Java. Nor do we use Dynabooks and Altos; instead, we got Microsoft Windows. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Jacobson#Career http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Jacobson#Career [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion-avoidance_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion-avoidance_algori...

coldnebo 12y ago
Good points. We might be focusing on different evidence for good design. Certainly a system has to be tested -- the theory is not enough. But areas of TCP that were designed up front were things like being able to carry arbitrary payloads, including itself! This is what makes ssh and vpns possible. By contrast, many web protocols break when tunneling: soap within soap. Also, for those unfamiliar with the actual process of protocol development back in those days, it was a wire protocol, which meant formal modeling and testing. Sure, it doesnt catch everything, but the web is far less formal. For example, the w3c originally said it wasn't going to provide an XML parser reference implementation because any graduate student should be able to code it up in two weeks. WTH?! While I don't doubt that is true, in practice it has meant that dozens of slightly different parsers were written, leading to hundreds of slightly different incompatibilities. Anyone who has had to integrate two different XML stacks will know. I use Ruby, which was inspired by smalltalk; modern Java is also becoming much more functional. In some ways, it has taken the larger community 20 years to understand Kay's vision. Also, he always said that the systems he worked on were prototypes -- he's commented before that he fully expected real-world systems to have surpased his long ago. But now we have Ruby, Node and Rust. Even Java and Spring.io have dramatically reshaped things towards a "smalltalkish" future. So I still put a lot of weight behind some of Kay's observations of the industry.

olavk 12y ago

The web might have been created by amateurs, but it works incredibly well. Sure, we have browser incompatibilities and whatnot, but this is an effect of having multiple independent implementations of the standards, which is part of what makes the web work in the first place.

coldnebo 12y ago
no, it doesn't. Having multiple independent implementations is a PITA, but that's why you have testing & validation labs along with standards. Take windows graphics driver labs... They test for pixel perfect compliance of output across hundreds of vendor implementations. Contrast that to the web where it took a separate group outside the w3c to embarrass browsers with the ACID2&3 tests. Now separate browsers look a lot closer in output. Devs are trying to fix these ecosystems: why does react use a virtual dom? Why do we need css resets? Why do we need js shims and polyfills? Because its the only way to come close to normalizing the platform. But have you ever wondered why you expect no two browsers display the same image? Postscript met that bar and is just as old as the web. Why didn't the w3c base the web on device independent coordinates instead of this confusing and unpredicatble layering of partial scalars and "angle subtended by a pixel on a 96dpi surface at a nominal arms length from the surface" crap? No one could have made a reference implementation off those requirements, much less a consistent verification & validation suite. And no offense to TBL, but HTTP didn't even survive first contact with netscape's vision of shopping carts. Cookies? An elegant solution? Or simple a new hell of tunneling client/server state over a supposedly stateless protocol. HTTPS everywhere requires long lived sessions as the basis?!? No wonder people are heading towards web sockets, etc. webapps are client/server apps -- HTTP was always grossly misapplied to them. Webdev is hard, not because I'm building beatiful bridges in the sky that are "good enough" poetic balances of constraints while coming in on time and on budget... Webdev is hard because of all the underlying assumptions I constantly have to check and recheck because I can't rely on them as an ME would (or hell, even as a backend J2EE engineer would). This is why some of us lament that people don't know the stack all the way down, because we have to in order to solve real problems. Every abstraction leaks, but hell, web abstractions are flipping sieves! No, the thing that "works incredibly well" is not the web, but whats under it that lets us make so very many mistakes and yet keep on trucking.

vonmoltke 12y ago

Alas, mathematics is really the "good enough" standard we in CS should strive for just like physics is the "good enough" standard behind ME and EE. Unfortunately as CS opened to the mainstream, I think a deep fear of mathematics led us to view this as "over engineering" even when it wasn't. The results are that the majority of the web is woefully underengineered, requiring far more money and time for inferior products. As I have stated multiple times in the past, I think the crux of the problem is that software is an immature field that needs to stratify into a proper engineering discipline as it matures. Computer science should be the "good enough" standard behind software engineering. "Computer scientists" should not be the ones actually implementing software systems any more than physicists should be the ones designing cam shafts or laying out circuit boards. The opening to the mainstream you refer to illustrates the problem. The people in the mainstream should not be studying computer science, and what they practice should not be called such. They are the engineers, technicians, and mechanics of software; they are not the physicists. Forcing all of these strata into the same bucket is doing more harm than good at this point and is likely hampering the field's drive to mature.

engi_nerd 12y ago
What would software programming look like as a true engineering discipline?
- rjbwork 12y ago
  (my bias as a C# dev will show here) Most likely a professional association, with a test you have to take to call yourself a software engineer demonstrating basic competency in a couple of paradigms, and a rudimentary knowledge of patterns and practices. It's 2015, there's no reason that anyone should be writing Big Object Oriented Code, without practicing dependency injection, basic mocking and testing, and other modern development principles. And yet, here we are, with millions to billions of lines of terrible new code written every year.