I believe the title is misleading out of context, I think it is meant to lack conclusions or clear statements and simply outline some areas for discussion ... a proposition paper?
I'm not familiar with what that really means, just jumping to an assumption about the intent of the paper that I think was not made clear in the title as is.
In that case I won't waste my time reading this, but submit my outline of a Useful Theory of Software Engineering:
It comes down to making a good choice in each of the following areas. (My choice is in parens, along with my comments.)
Cloud Platform
(For historical reasons I am on Azure. I have some experience with Google. It does not hurt of course to work in several, but the cognitive overhead of gaining a real in depth devops knowledge on very many platforms will be overwhelming for many people, especially as the vendors invent stuff on the fly.)
Relational Database Management System
(Strive to learn SQL and 1 or 2 platforms, mine is SQL Server, as best as possible. There is only one useful data model, and it is the relational model. You will store data with other means over your career, but learning them is mostly trivial, and if your are intentionally using a different data model than relational, you should have a good reason. Also learn to data model using natural keys. This is a huge topic unto itself. The main justification is it will simplify the queries you end up using. A friend of mine is working on a book on nat keys. There is a real shortage of good literature on this topic.)
An application programming language
(Mine is F#. Learn one or 2 languages well, chosen because the compiler and canonical workflows do so much to keep you out of trouble. You will have to know 1 or 2 scripting languages our of necessity. Given the other areas you need real expertise in, I am not a fan of spending a lot of time with the language of the month club. Become an expert in the language(s) you use. It's a career-long pursuit.)
Project Management
(Recently saw a good overview video of the "no estimates" approach. I was sceptical before I saw it. Not really impressed by Agile, but I don't want to wade into that swamp.)
Specification Language
(A new area for me. I am interested in TLA+, but I'm still learning it. The idea of a specification language that delivers an unambiguous spec at an arbitrary level of granularity that you can manipulate and refactor is very appealing to my sense of propriety. We spend too much time going straight to prototype in our favorite language, refactoring it, etc. TLA+ forces you to focus on actual spec and not implementation details. The prototype approach leads us all to confuse implementation and spec.)
I think the call was for
something more than 'throw this shit togheter hope it stick'
And, to be perfectly honest, the technological stack is maybe the minor part of engineering a software system, both because compositions at different scales are already well defined and because the actual complexities are outside software selection and well into the user-software-developer interactions and specifically in non functional requirementd.
This isn't really a theory but a set of tools that help you do your job. A theory would gives a means to make predictions about software engineering projects. It would naturally give us a way of working such that projects don't fail.
But I don't disagree with you. It's important to learn those things.
The systematic study of methods for producing high quality software. Your comment is equivalent to calling a flexural test machine 'materials engineering'.
Granted. I'll throw out the cloud platform, but keep the others.
1) There is no substitute for the relational model. Clearly it is a paradigm for building mathematical objects.
2) I didn't strongly advocate my choice of F#. Strongly-typed, functional first, ML syntax language is the sweet spot today. In theory this predicts faster development and fewer bugs. All software assemblies are mathematical objects, those built with strongly-typed, functional languages tend to be more humanly comprehendible.
3) No estimates allows practitioners to make useful projections of the course of a project. (Of the 4, this one has the weakest claim to belong to theory, yet I will argue useful projections are a kind of prediction.)
4) TLA+, or something like it, separates spec from implementation detail and makes "predictions" (at arbitrary level of granularity) of what a completed software component will do.
It would reduce my stress to imagine a world where my grandchildren didn't die from atrophy during the great power outage of 2079, where only the 10% of humanity that weren't reliant on exercise machines exercising their muscles for them, survived.
> In our culture, people suffering from schizophrenia or other forms of psychosis are more likely than members of other cultures to recognize their hallucinations as a symptom of pathology, but they also tend to have hallucinations that are very violent and negative.
I can see how encouraging positive relationships could be beneficial for anyone with such a symptom, regardless of figuring out if it's a symptom of pathology (depending on the culture context.)
I wonder if this also has to do with the mythology of Western religion that says humans are fundamentally flawed and bad. Western religion tends to promote this idea that we are fundamentally bad and our only hope for salvation lies in Jesus. With this mindset then of course if you hear a voice coming from inside your head it must be bad and violent.
I grew up in an extremely fundamentalist Christian cult and I heard many talk fearfully about demon possession and experiencing supernatural phenomena that they attributed to the Devil. Of course later in life I realized that many of those people were probably mentally ill, and not recognizing the symptoms for what they were because they saw things through a different lens, which was one of a world in which Satan was out to get you.
It makes sense that in a culture that reveres the ancestors one would tend to attribute hearing voices to ancestors as well, and could have a more peaceful relationship with their own abnormal experience.
That should be easy to study. Both Judaism and Islam don't know the concept of original sin, that's a Christian idea. Judaism holds that humans have capacity to do good and evil, and that everyone has a choice. Islam teaches that humans are fundamentally good and have an innate capacity to follow the will of God. Someone must already have looked at how schizophrenia manifests itself in devout Jews and Muslims.
Mental illness is not just a personal problem, mental illness is also a social problem. When all of society is set up to get you to do stuff for them, and treat you badly when you don't perform, when you can no longer perform society will specifically make you mentally ill, with bad treatment as being a non-worthy human being. In other more social societies, and our society is extremely anti-social and sociopathic in how we use people, people that are no longer able to contribute are not made to feel extremely unwelcome, this goes a long way towards them not feeling insecure and turning to negative emotions due to their insecurities.
It's interesting in our society we have lots of tolerance for those born with mental illness or the ones permanently disabled. But we don't have a lot of tolerance for those down on their luck, or dealing with depression, or other mental issues. There is an implicit understanding that they should just get their act together and perform.
I wouldn't be too certain about that. There are Christian- specifically American Evangelical Christian- approaches to responding to such voices in a positive way:
I find this topic fascinating because my experience with Evangelical churches is that there's a marked difference between the visions/messages shared by 'normal' church members and those of the churchgoers who had mental health issues (who are relatively overrepresented in Evangelical churches, in my experience).
The best I can explain the difference is that the 'normal' voices/visions were 1) generally more coherent, 2) often very much a matter of 'letting the subconscious/intuition speak' rather than an explicit voice, and 3) shared in a relatively cautious, painting-a-picture kind of way.
Sometimes I miss the way our 'inner voice' was encouraged and given a place, because quite often I think these messages or visions were quite valuable and even profound.
A lot of information can be conveyed with body language, context and emotion, to the point where it's difficult to distinguish from telepathy. Most especially with folks who've spent a great deal of time together.
I'm maybe not the only one who's experienced bits of 'beaming' with a long time friend or partner?
Perhaps "I have a pretty good idea of what X is thinking" is softer language than "I'm reading X's mind", but I can see how the experience of telepathy is not greatly distant from something that's normal for many people.
When I was in high school, my AP Chem class only had a handful of people in it. The chemistry teacher was a pretty awesome laid-back guy, and so in the month of school left after the AP test but before the end of the school year, we pretty much used all our class time to play pinochle.
After a few weeks of playing with the same partner, you can pretty much know what they have in their hand just by the way they play.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke
I completely agree though, I checked it out in-store and was far more impressed with the new MBP than the reviews had me believe I would be. People must be very spoiled to downplay it IMO. The keyboard and trackpad are really impressive. I'm debating whether to replace my old desktop with a i7-7700K or pickup the MBP15 1TB with a few dongles to hookup to my existing peripherals. It would be my first Mac ever (I had a Commodore 128 in the 80s) and it certainly seems like a marvel of engineering to me. I'm starting to think the best way to run Linux or Windows would be using either in VMWare under macOS or using Parallels to get the best of every world.
The one thing the Apple folks could've done better is make the tilde key the new escape and make the tilde/grave alt remaps. If I got one that would likely be the first thing I do.
I run Linux on my Mac using Veertu, which utilises the apple provided Hypervisor.framework. I've had a lot of success with it performance wise compared to VirtualBox, for example.
I just checked one out at the store, and my main observation is that the esc 'key' worked exactly as a real key would have. Provided it's there when you expect it to be (or can force it to be), I don't think I'd really miss it that much.
I still think they could have kept a couple standard USB ports to help ease the transition, but overall it seemed like a fine machine.
