a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
rjw  ·  3868 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Programming Sucks

You make a good point regarding software engineering having no stable body of knowledge (apart from project management - The Mythical Man-Month?).

I agree that analogies are shit, unfortunately the practice of using them to explain things is easy to pick up and hard to lose. Have you read "The cruelty of really teaching computer science" by Dijkstra? A lot of what you have said reminds me of that essay (regarding analogies).

Program derivation sounds interesting, though. I'm tempted to say that that would count as "Software Engineering". Do you know anything about this?