On Thursday, 26 March 2015 at 19:37:30 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Thursday, 26 March 2015 at 19:16:54 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
You're making a big assumption about which programmers and
projects count and which don't. I wonder if outside of Google
It doesn't matter what the programmers think, what matters is
how the development environment affects the project in
measurable terms. Having all kinds of features does not
necessarily benefit projects. That's the difference between a
fun toy language and one aiming for production and maintenance.
Programming is - for now - still a human activity, and what is
important in human activities may not always be measured, and
what may be easily measured is not always important. That
doesn't mean one should throw away the profiler and go back to
guessing, but it does suggest caution about adopting the
prestigious techniques of the natural sciences and applying them
to a domain where they don't necessarily fully belong.
I say this as someone coming from the financial markets, where we
have all experienced quite recently the effects of mistaking
being quantitative for thinking soundly - what happened ought not
to have been a surprise, and of those who saw 2008 coming and
spoke publicly about it, I don't think a single one based their
view on the quant especially. Yet the field of macroeconomics is
much more fully developed than that of assessing programmer
productivity and quality of output.
It is not scientific to depend on an approach that has not yet
proven itself in practical terms over the course of time and in
different environments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/
Laeeth.
