Обсуждение

Предыдущая публикация

Adam Smith is said to have "founded" capitalism the way Darwin founded evolutionary theory or Marx founded communism. And Founders are often venerated for having a key insight. In software development, "founder's code" is the polite term for a particular kind of technical debt.

Elf M. Sternberg

The libertarian weenies will start to whine, "But Adam Smith said..." yet, when you go read Adam Smith, you'll find he said exactly the same thing Max is saying. He was deeply suspicious about how centers of money could become centers of power and believed it was the state's job to prevent that.

Elf M. Sternberg

28 июл., 18:05

Project founders have a key insight and write code to satisfy whatever shortcoming that Insight was meant to address. But founders are often not experts in every software field. Any project above a certain size requires a team to review, validate, and bring technical expertise.

Elf M. Sternberg

28 июл., 18:05

Every project, every insight, when it meets the real world, requires empirical evidence and adjustment. The closer to the human condition that insight is, the more adjustment it will need. Physics can be positively boolean: it either works for doesn't.

Elf M. Sternberg

28 июл., 18:05

Chemistry is stochastic: depending upon the reagents, you can get a little or a large reaction and new substances. And humanity runs on what's tolerable: is the system keeping us alive or killing us?

Elf M. Sternberg

28 июл., 18:05

So Smith and Marx were trying to find a more tolerable system, but their insight was incomplete. When someone quotes either of them directly, they're engaging in veneration and tradition. They're avoiding chang. They're not trying to improve the human condition.