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Software Engineering for Internet Applications

Tags: web, engineering, book on 2008-04-07 and saved by8 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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EDUCAUSE Publications: Educom Review March/April, 1999

Tags: art, education, engineering, learning, math, science on 2008-01-07 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.educause.edu

In fact the most
successful systems that humans have been able to design are ones in which
most of the design effort goes into letting the system be able to grow in a
fashion that detects and corrects the error, so that the system doesn't
come apart. The Internet is a good example of that, because it's something
that didn't require any central control and wasn't constructed, the way a
clock is constructed. Another good example is the American Constitution,
because the people who designed it realized that it would be very difficult
to write laws for how people should live 50 years from their time and
place, so they wisely made most of the Constitution a way of dealing with
error situations that would come up and a way of keeping bad things from
propagating. They didn't try to tell people how they should live over the
next two centuries.
The reason our group has been successful is
that our whole development system is designed to allow us to late-bind
things that we discover along the way, things we would not have to find out
along the way if we had a real engineering discipline.
Anyway, Open Source Software is
software done the way science is done, and the code you write is open to
scrutiny and criticism and improvement by people you have never met.
I would say that, temperamentally, I am basically an idealist, which makes me
pretty much of a mathematician. Scientists tend to be realists, and
engineers pragmatists.
Creative organizations -- at least the ones I have been in -- were
like science in that they have first-level anarchy and second-level
controls.
Science absolutely can't
allow dogma -- that's anarchy -- so you have to allow scientists to think
and explore and come up with any theory. And then for this thing to work
you have to have the second level of stuff which says, okay, now let's
debug these ideas. So I would say a very large number of people don't
understand how science works.