Jon, As an observer of software "engineering" since its inception in 1968 (my first job as a programmer was that fall, and that spring/summer is when the NATO conference first coined the phrase), I can and will (braggadocio here) state that most software CANNOT be engineered, precision or otherwise, and all that we have learned in the past 52 years in both computer science and software engineering is essentially irrelevant to the production of application level software.
The protocols that ensure cat photos are scattered into packets traversing vast segments of the Internet to be reassembled and presented on you phone in real time, is an example of the minority of software that can be engineered. The vote counting app _could not have been_. The difference is that the first replicates, in software, a deterministic machine with limited variables, all of which can be known and quantified, limited relations among variables, all of which can be known and stated; and the second one is a complex system where variables and relations are highly dynamic, idiosyncratic, and, often, quite literally unknowable. I just completed a sixty-page essay on this subject "Why Programming is Hard and Software Development is (Mostly) Impossible" that addresses this issue. If you would like to read, let me know and I will send you a link or the paper. Making things worse is the superstructure around software development — all the methodologies, all the frameworks, all the management levels, all the practices that supposedly guide/govern the process of developing software. Icing on the cake, is attitude. Those that contract for software EXPECT that the project will fail and/or that what they get will be a pale imitation of what they wanted, full of bugs and inconsistencies. The development team also EXPECTS the project to fail, for different reasons, but fail nevertheless. And roughly 90-percent of the time both sides have their expectations realized. (60-65 % of projects started are abandoned without any delivery, the other 20-25 percent are those pale imitations over budget and taking twice the time.) One more factor - the game is rigged. Those that might actually be able to deliver reasonable software applications are not allowed to play in the game. Acronym and Shadow came into existence because people in Hillary Clinton's campaign thought they saw a way to make money and used their connections to get established and make contracts. The "bid" process was laughable, the specs being written such that no one but Shadow could comply and in a time frame that Microsoft, et. al. were not able to respond adequately. Half a billion dollars were spent on the Obamacare website and another half-billion to get it to work after the initial failure. A startup team of Web-developers built the site with full functionality, including calculating subsidies (supposedly the hard part) in a week. Their site was demoed on Sixty Minutes. But they would never have been allowed to bid on the original project because they did not meet Federal procurement guidelines which were rigged to very large companies most of whom have a remarkably long history of spectacular failures on past projects. Frothing at the mouth so much, am at risk of dehydration. dave On Fri, Feb 7, 2020, at 8:54 PM, Jon Zingale wrote: > My intention in drawing attention to critical application > development is an attempt to deepen the discussion > around 'apps' and rhetoric. In the discussions around > app usage in the democratic primaries, the target appears > to be the vulnerability which exists today because > programmers today are a bunch of python hacks who > never read Knuth. Yet, not a single Friam mother-church > meeting passes without a discussion of the precision > engineering embodied in our Porches, Teslas, or iphones. > > Of particular interest to me in directing this rhetorical frame > are the so-called-on-wikipedia FBI-Apple encryption dispute > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_dispute> > and the Target corp data breach <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.04940.pdf> of > 2013. In the first case, > the federal government is confronted by the reality that a > phone manufacturer *can* in fact make cryptographically > challenging hand held devices. Further we can use this > powerful technology for sending our family cat pictures > which arrive at their target destinations almost without > fail and near instantaneously. There is a sense of *justified* > *indignation* when the cat photo takes more than a second > to be delivered. The state-of-the-art is such that we *can* > have nice things. > > In the second case, a data breach is exploited in the POS system > of big box corporation which sells mostly useless things. Next, > a public rhetoric emerges similar to the rhetoric I am witnessing > here with the democratic primaries. Instead of pointing out that > Target corp doesn't consider our privacy a critical concern, we > speak of how impossible it is to have privacy and how vulnerable > we feel because Target corp is a critical institution. > > Jon > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
