Comment by frklem
8 months ago
"Faced with such a marked defensive negative attitude on the part of a biased culture, men who have knowledge of technical objects and appreciate their significance try to justify their judgment by giving to the technical object the only status that today has any stability apart from that granted to aesthetic objects, the status of something sacred. This, of course, gives rise to an intemperate technicism that is nothing other than idolatry of the machine and, through such idolatry, by way of identification, it leads to a technocratic yearning for unconditional power. The desire for power confirms the machine as a way to supremacy and makes of it the modern philtre (love-potion)." Gilbert Simondon, On the mode of existence of technical objects.
This is exactly what I interpret from these kind of articles: engineering just for the cause of engineering. I am not saying we should not investigate on how to improve our engineered artifacts, or that we should not improve them. But I see a generalized lack of reflection on why we should do it, and I think it is related to a detachment from the domains we create software for. The article suggests uses of the technology that come from so different ways of using it, that it looses coherence as a technical item.
For each of the items discussed I explicitly mention why they would be desirable to have. How is this engineering for the sake of engineering?
True, for each of the points discussed, there is an explicit mention on why it is desirable. But those are technical solutions, to technical problems. There is nothing wrong with that. The issue is, that the whole article is about technicalities because of technicalities, hence the 'engineering for the cause of engineering' (which is different from '.. for the sake of...'). It is at this point that the 'idea of rebuilding Kafka' becomes a pure technical one, detached from the intention of having something like Kafka. Other commenters in the thread also pointed out to the fact of Kafka not having a clear intention. I agree that a lot of software nowadays suffer from the same problem.