<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title></title><style type="text/css">p.MsoNormal,p.MsoNoSpacing{margin:0}</style></head><body><div style="font-family:Arial;">Jon,<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">As an observer of software "engineering" since its inception in 1968 (my first job as a programmer was that fall, and that spring/summer is when the NATO conference first coined the phrase), I can and will (braggadocio here) state that most software CANNOT be engineered, precision or otherwise, and all that we have learned in the past 52 years in both computer science and software engineering is essentially irrelevant to the production of application level software.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">The protocols that ensure cat photos are scattered into packets traversing vast segments of the Internet to be reassembled and presented on you phone in real time, is an example of the minority of software that can be engineered. The vote counting app <u>could not have been</u>.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">The difference is that the first replicates, in software, a deterministic machine with limited variables, all of which can be known and quantified, limited relations among variables, all of which can be known and stated; and the second one is a complex system where variables and relations are highly dynamic, idiosyncratic, and, often, quite literally unknowable.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">I just completed a sixty-page essay on this subject "Why Programming is Hard and Software Development is (Mostly) Impossible" that addresses this issue. If you would like to read, let me know and I will send you a link or the paper.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">Making things worse is the superstructure around software development — all the methodologies, all the frameworks, all the management levels, all the practices that supposedly guide/govern the process of developing software.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">Icing on the cake, is attitude. Those that contract for software EXPECT that the project will fail and/or that what they get will be a pale imitation of what they wanted, full of bugs and inconsistencies. The development team also EXPECTS the project to fail, for different reasons, but fail nevertheless.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">And roughly 90-percent of the time both sides have their expectations realized. (60-65 % of projects started are abandoned without any delivery, the other 20-25 percent are those pale imitations over budget and taking twice the time.)<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">One more factor - the game is rigged. Those that might actually be able to deliver reasonable software applications are not allowed to play in the game. Acronym and Shadow came into existence because people in Hillary Clinton's campaign thought they saw a way to make money and used their connections to get established and make contracts. The "bid" process was laughable, the specs being written such that no one but Shadow could comply and in a time frame that Microsoft, et. al. were not able to respond adequately.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">Half a billion dollars were spent on the Obamacare website and another half-billion to get it to work after the initial failure. A startup team of Web-developers built the site with full functionality, including calculating subsidies (supposedly the hard part) in a week. Their site was demoed on Sixty Minutes. But they would never have been allowed to bid on the original project because they did not meet Federal procurement guidelines which were rigged to very large companies most of whom have a remarkably long history of spectacular failures on past projects.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">Frothing at the mouth so much, am at risk of dehydration.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">dave<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div>On Fri, Feb 7, 2020, at 8:54 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:<br></div><blockquote type="cite" id="qt"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">My intention in drawing attention to critical application<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">development is an attempt to deepen the discussion<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">around 'apps' and rhetoric. In the discussions around<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">app usage in the democratic primaries, the target appears<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">to be the vulnerability which exists today because<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">programmers today are a bunch of python hacks who<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">never read Knuth. Yet, not a single Friam mother-church<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">meeting passes without a discussion of the precision<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">engineering embodied in our Porches, Teslas, or iphones.<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default"><br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">Of particular interest to me in directing this rhetorical frame<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">are the so-called-on-wikipedia <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_dispute">FBI-Apple encryption dispute</a><br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">and the <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.04940.pdf">Target corp data breach</a> of 2013. In the first case,<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">the federal government is confronted by the reality that a<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">phone manufacturer <i>can</i> in fact make cryptographically<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">challenging hand held devices. Further we can use this<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">powerful technology for sending our family cat pictures<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">which arrive at their target destinations almost without<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">fail and near instantaneously. There is a sense of <i>justified</i><br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default"><i>indignation</i> when the cat photo takes more than a second<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">to be delivered. The state-of-the-art is such that we <i>can</i><br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">have nice things.<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default"><br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">In the second case, a data breach is exploited in the POS system<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">of big box corporation which sells mostly useless things. Next,<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">a public rhetoric emerges similar to the rhetoric I am witnessing<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">here with the democratic primaries. Instead of pointing out that<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">Target corp doesn't consider our privacy a critical concern, we<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">speak of how impossible it is to have privacy and how vulnerable<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">we feel because Target corp is a critical institution.<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default"><br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default">Jon<br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default"><br></div><div style="font-family:garamond, serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="qt-gmail_default"><br></div></div><div>============================================================<br></div><div>FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv<br></div><div>Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College<br></div><div>to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com<br></div><div>archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/<br></div><div>FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove<br></div><div><br></div></blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div></body></html>