On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 3:22 AM, Steve Dekorte <[email protected]> wrote:
> It seems as if each computing culture fails to establish a measure for it's > own goals which leaves it with no means of critically analyzing it's > assumptions resulting in the technical equivalent of religious dogma. From > this perspective, new technical cultures are more like religious reform > movements than new scientific theories which are measured by agreement with > experiment. e.g. had the Smalltalk community said "if it can reduce the > overall code >X without a performance cost >Y" it's better, perhaps > prototypes would have been adopted long ago. But code size versus performance is only one of many concurrent trade-offs, when it comes to defining 'better'. Different individuals or groups can have legitimately different needs. The more people are involved (and the more invested they are), the more difficult the consensus-building process. Measurements can help, but they are human artifacts as well, in their own way. They don't necessarily pull you up out of the muck of the human political process. I'd say the issue isn't with computing culture per se, but with culture in general. There's a big gap between Science as the rational, disinterested pursuit of knowledge and *any* engaged "technical culture", even of people as enlightened (and as few) as Smalltalkers. -- Max
_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
