As a scientist I love the company of my scientist friends. We can chat to the early morning sun about electrical fields and the properties of quarks. When with the mathematicians we never lose a moment to stroke our beards over Euler and Riemann. Oh and the practical japes I enjoy with my engineer chums in the HE physics lab.
But my engineer buddies for all the great things they've built never got anything reliable enough to work for long. Fortunately the scientists know how to fix it, they're still waiting for some results to come in but they reckon they've achieved perfection, at least on paper. My mathematical mates have an elegant proof of this discrepancy, something to do with the set of all sets that don't include themselves as subsets.
Anyway it's not as if we can't all work together. Between us we've discovered that if offered the choice of a one or five year warranty on a device built to last exactly 13 months, 90% of the time I will opt for the service contract thus achieving the optimal transfer of money from my pocket to elsewhere.
On Fri, 19 May 2006 13:02:46 +0800 Chris McCormick chris@mccormick.cx wrote:
On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 11:53:40PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Wed, 17 May 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
I disagree. For me practice is much more important than theory. There are endless theoretical issues with software, yet it generally works. For example, the old theories of software development say that the linux kernel development model does not work. Theories should be based on observation.
Theories that aren't based on observation (and/or logical proofs from axioms) aren't theories by any scientific standard. They're called speculations.
This is true. To me what Hans is talking about is one of the distinctions between engineering and science. A scientist must make sure that his theory holds together in all ways possible, and must test it in reality. An engineer just needs to know what works for a particular and specific application. Hans seems more interested in an engineering solution than a scientific one.i
Theory can be extremely useful; two times already I have had an engineer try to convince me that they can come up with a generic algorithm to solve in polynomial time what I classified as an NP-hard problem. Next time I am betting beer on it.
Best,
Chris.
chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx
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