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by edmundsauto 2428 days ago
Respectfully, I strongly disagree. Software components, in isolation, may be understandable. Software systems are significantly more complex and often have completely unexpected properties.

Not to dismiss the challenges of physical engineering, but as you say -- it's essentially Bayesian, with very strong priors available. Physical reality, on the human scale, can be comprehended with relatively straightforward equations, mod some fudge factor. We can account for the unknowns in the physical world with that; whereas software's complexity isn't limited to linear changes -- complexity can quickly grow exponentially.
1 comments
gamblor956 2427 days ago
Shared this with the engineers and programmers at my company. They all had a good laugh.

Software is deterministic. Reality is not. Engineering is significantly harder than programming, and programmers have only themselves to blame for not properly handling failure modalities.

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ethbro 2427 days ago
No harm intended to the GP's feelings, but glad someone got a chuckle.

I feel really bad for the poor (insert variety of) biologists on here.

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edmundsauto 2427 days ago
I think we're using different meanings for software. I'm using it to include all things around building software -- requirements gathering, writing, shipping, maintaining, ops, deployment, etc.

Software is not predictable. That's why nobody can accurately predict how long a project will take.

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gamblor956 2427 days ago
Software is predictable compared to reality because every part of it is deterministic, or can be programmed to be deterministic.

The fact that most programmers are incapable of properly coding their software to be deterministic says more about the quality of the programmer than the difficulty of the field.

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edmundsauto 2427 days ago
Reality doesn't have to be deterministic to be predictable. Software components can be (theoretically) deterministic and still have unpredictable behaviors in complex systems.

The fact that these welders didn't clean the acetylene edges doesn't mean that this outcome was unpredictable. Wouldn't it say as much about the welders as the difficult of the field?

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ethbro 2426 days ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondestructive_testing
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