[FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

Sat Feb 8 12:02:50 EST 2020

Here!  Here!  The Paper, the Paper!!!

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz
Sent: Saturday, February 8, 2020 6:41 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

Please post a link to your paper. I for one would love to read it. 

On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 3:45 AM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm> > wrote:

Jon,

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.

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 could not have been.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Frothing at the mouth so much, am at risk of dehydration.

dave

On Fri, Feb 7, 2020, at 8:54 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:

My intention in drawing attention to critical application

development is an attempt to deepen the discussion

around 'apps' and rhetoric. In the discussions around

app usage in the democratic primaries, the target appears

to be the vulnerability which exists today because

programmers today are a bunch of python hacks who

never read Knuth. Yet, not a single Friam mother-church

meeting passes without a discussion of the precision

engineering embodied in our Porches, Teslas, or iphones.

Of particular interest to me in directing this rhetorical frame

are the so-called-on-wikipedia FBI-Apple <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_dispute>  encryption dispute

and the Target corp data breach <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.04940.pdf>  of 2013. In the first case,

the federal government is confronted by the reality that a

phone manufacturer can in fact make cryptographically

challenging hand held devices. Further we can use this

powerful technology for sending our family cat pictures

which arrive at their target destinations almost without

fail and near instantaneously. There is a sense of justified

indignation when the cat photo takes more than a second

to be delivered. The state-of-the-art is such that we can

have nice things.

In the second case, a data breach is exploited in the POS system

of big box corporation which sells mostly useless things. Next,

a public rhetoric emerges similar to the rhetoric I am witnessing

here with the democratic primaries. Instead of pointing out that

Target corp doesn't consider our privacy a critical concern, we

speak of how impossible it is to have privacy and how vulnerable

we feel because Target corp is a critical institution.

Jon

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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