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On May 28, 2014 1:35 PM, "Dirk Laurie" <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I ran into this somewhere.
>
> Understanding Engineers #7
>
> Normal people believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe
> that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
In a different form, this has been my koan for the week:
We build systems teetering on the edge of our ability to manage complexity.
Go grab your copy of "The Mythical Man-Month" from the shelf. Yes, the 20th Anniversary Edition is fine. You could look at early rocketry or radio navigation to see the same patterns of struggle to organize things just barely understood, and the failure modes which are not.
"The Mythical Man-Month" is important to us not only because it describes a particular struggle with complexity, but because it proposes strategies for groups to better do so. So we've been able to build more complex systems because we have learned software engineering, better styles of organization and coordination for people as well as code.
We still walk right back to the edge of the complexity cliff for many reasons. Silicon vendors do continue to produce old designs, but the pressure is to produce them more cheaply — or smaller, or with wider operating parameters.
> Now why did that immediately remind me of lua-l?
Because you too are worried that adding integer arithmetic may yet be a bridge too far? :-)