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Donnerstag, März 22, 2007
Dreaming in code Entropy
Also ich aplträume nich nicht vom Code, aber dieser Herr stellt doch endlich mal die richtigen Fragen und versucht hoffentlich auch, Antworten dafür zu finden: (Der Ed-Yourdon-Report rezensiert das Buch hier)
Hadn’t we built software before? (Yes.) Didn’t we test everything? (Not well enough, apparently.) How could we have screwed up so badly? (No good answer.) Internet time proved fleeting and was quickly displaced by newer coinages untainted by association with a closed-out decade’s investment fads. But the buzzword-mongers were onto something. Time really does seem to behave differently around the act of making software. When things go well, you can lose track of passing hours in the state psychologists call “flow.” When things go badly, you get stuck, frozen between dimensions, unable to move or see a way forward. Either way, you’ve left the clock far behind. You’re on software time.
Zu Recht werden die guten Fußnoten gewürdigt - da ist man lost in hyperlink space nach einer Weile...
Wenn man es endlich mal wieder mit mit der Entropie (auch Entropie in der Theorie) versuchen möchte, dann gibt Ed Yourdon einen guten Anreiz:
“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? “I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”
Ein gutes blogroll auf dieser Fischmaaakt-Digger-Seite.