Comment by agent327
2 years ago
Aren't you being overly optimistic about the engineering disciplines' ability to compute things? How does engineering work: do you sit down with a spec (say, "create a wing that can lift a passenger plane"), and then run some formulas, and end up with a wing? Or do you propose a wing, based on past experience (rough shape and size), and _then_ bring in computation to make sure it provides the correct amount of lift, iterating through designs as you go?
Because I think it's really the last one. There is no formula to design a bridge: you design the bridge, and then use formulas and lookup tables to validate it is strong enough. Same for pretty much anything else produced by any engineering discipline.
So in that sense, engineering and programming aren't all that far apart: both start from past experience, and use various validation methods after a design has been proposed, iterating through designs to reach an optimal state. Software engineering, being a younger discipline, is still working on validation methods, and many practitioners find they simply have no budget to apply them (nor any life-or-death constraints that force them to). That's ok though. If you design a new can opener you aren't going through all the processes that apply to an airliner either.
No. theory is very much part of the creation of the bridge. It is not just for verification.
If you read more carefully. What I am saying is that in software engineering, there is no theory. It's all Design. All made up. There's also no verification of the design itself.
> There's no verification of the design itself.
I think this is mostly a philosophical statement, but it certainly has truth to it.
Code reviews / rework tackle mostly the code, but not the fundamental design. However the execution of the code tackles the design as well:
- If the design is wrong, the result is bad, that is detected at the execution phase.
- If the design is suboptimal (hard to maintain or extend, bad cpu load, hard to reuse...), well that is usually not solved. IMO that matches your point.
>I think this is mostly a philosophical statement, but it certainly has truth to it.
It's fact. What theory is there to prove that the following design is the best possible design? What does "best" even mean? We can't verify formally in anyway how good a design is overall.
We can verify, efficiency, we can verify speed, and we can verify correctness. But design? We can't verify that.
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