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An expert would be able to skim it, recognize the path of reasoning as something he's seen a before, and narrow down on the error quickly. Reasoning about somet

An expert would be able to skim it, recognize the path of reasoning as something he's seen a before, and narrow down on the error quickly. Reasoning about something by how many "waves in the community" it has made is a deference of personal judgement to the social network an individual is embedded in, which is a useful shortcut when you are not an expert relative to your peers, but dangerous set of mind to operate in for any lengthy amount of time, as it can be the basis of cults and the like.

evanpw 11y ago
> An expert would be able to skim it, recognize the path of reasoning as something he's seen a before, and narrow down on the error quickly. This is almost exactly equivalent to saying that an expert programmer should be able to determine whether an unfamiliar, complicated code base contains a bug by skimming the source. The hard bugs are going to be subtle.
- ejk314 11y ago
  > complicated code base So then the answer is certainly "yes" with the same level of certainty that algorias is claiming. Large, complicated solutions are inherently likely to have subtle flaws.
- anfedorov 11y ago
  Not at all equivalent, because code isn't meant to be human readable, but computer interpretable. Because of these different goals, computer code is actually quite a bit harder to read than a well structured academic paper. I think programmers have a lot to learn about logical structure from writing meant to be read by humans [1]. Note how many people on this thread seem to be understanding and discussion its contents, whereas if I were to post 13 pages of "unfamiliar, complicated code" that claimed to do something, I can't imagine anyone would help me debug it. 1. Knuth expounds on this idea here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
- irljf 11y ago
  I agree, but not all bugs are subtle. This seems to be the equivalent to someone having trouble with "hello world" because they forgot to include iostream.

evanpw 11y ago

> An expert would be able to skim it, recognize the path of reasoning as something he's seen a before, and narrow down on the error quickly. This is almost exactly equivalent to saying that an expert programmer should be able to determine whether an unfamiliar, complicated code base contains a bug by skimming the source. The hard bugs are going to be subtle.

ejk314 11y ago
> complicated code base So then the answer is certainly "yes" with the same level of certainty that algorias is claiming. Large, complicated solutions are inherently likely to have subtle flaws.
anfedorov 11y ago
Not at all equivalent, because code isn't meant to be human readable, but computer interpretable. Because of these different goals, computer code is actually quite a bit harder to read than a well structured academic paper. I think programmers have a lot to learn about logical structure from writing meant to be read by humans [1]. Note how many people on this thread seem to be understanding and discussion its contents, whereas if I were to post 13 pages of "unfamiliar, complicated code" that claimed to do something, I can't imagine anyone would help me debug it. 1. Knuth expounds on this idea here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
irljf 11y ago
I agree, but not all bugs are subtle. This seems to be the equivalent to someone having trouble with "hello world" because they forgot to include iostream.