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Date: 2009-12-02 02:18 pm (UTC)
jducoeur: (0)
From: [personal profile] jducoeur
I imagine that I have a concept of programming as way too much of an "exact science" -- that there's one Right Way to get the thing to work, and infinite wrong ones -- than is really the case.

Far moreso, I expect. While it's true that there is often one best way to deal with a specific little nugget of problem, the overall job of building a significant program is usually much more engineering than science. Indeed, the *best* metaphor for programming is architecture, in almost every way: the ambiguities involved in how to get the job done; the way that science helps but doesn't define the outcome; the way that you *can* get the job done as a fellow craft, but it's much more satisfying to seek the master's path; etc.

I've often spoken out against the term "computer science", which is what the major is usually called in college, precisely because programming is *not* mainly a science, it's an engineering discipline and one that is still evolving rapidly. There's a little science to it (in particular, debugging, done properly, is science in the precise technical sense), but there's much more engineering to the journeyman level, and much more art to the master level...
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