Comment by lolinder
7 months ago
> Just because your wooden plane glides doesn't mean it's AC an actual plane
But if your wooden plane can somehow make it to Europe, collect cargo, and bring it back to your island, what you're doing is definitely not cargo culting.
It might not be actual engineering, maybe you don't understand aerodynamics or how the engine works, and maybe the plane falls apart when it hits the runway on the return flight, but if you got the cargo back you are doing something very different from cargo culting.
That's why copypasta doesn't count as cargo culting. It accomplishes the same task once copied as it did before. It may do so less reliably and less legibly, but it does do what it used to do in its original context.
Sure, but these are categorically different and not related to my point.
Let me quote wiki[0]
Even in the example it gives the code will "work." You can collect garbage when the language already does that, you'll get performance hits, but your code won't break.
It "it doesn't _work_" disqualifies something from not being cargo cult programming, then there would be no cargo cult programming. Who is shipping code that doesn't compile or hits runtime errors with any form of execution? You couldn't do that for very long.
Let's take an airplane example. Say you want to copy Boeing[1]. You notice that every 747 has a coffee maker on it. So you also make a coffee maker. After all, it is connected to the electrical system and the engines. Every time you take out the coffee maker the airplane fails. So you just put in a coffee maker.
A cargo cult exists BECAUSE _something_ is "working". BECAUSE they have evidence. But it is about misunderstanding the causality. See also Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science"[2]. As dumb as people are, there's always a reason people do things. It is usually not a good reason and it is often a bad reason, but there is a reason. Even people will explain you "causal" explanations for things like astrology.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming
[1] Well in the past you might have wanted to lol
[2] https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf
His explanation explicitly acknowledges the experiment works. In fact, even the math to explain the experiment "works". But it is wrong. Related is Von Neuman's Elephant. Where Freeman Dyson had evidence that a theory explained an experiment, yet it was in fact wrong. Evidence isn't sufficient to determine causality.
To quote the original source that Wiki cites and is derived from:
> A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. A cargo cult programmer will usually explain the extra code as a way of working around some bug encountered in the past, but usually neither the bug nor the reason the code apparently avoided the bug was ever fully understood (compare {shotgun debugging}, {voodoo programming}).
This is categorically different than the kinds of copypasta that TFA is talking about, and it's different in that the copypasta in TFA does serve a purpose.
There's a world of difference between copying something whose implementation you don't understand but whose function you do understand versus copying something which you vaguely associate with a particular outcome.
https://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-2.9.6.dos.txt
I think this is where we're butting heads, because I think this is an ambiguous term.