Tree TromboneOfMassDestruction

Navigation ...

lh_home.png
lh_fli.png

Scientific Writing ...

lh_AA.png
lh_AC.png
lh_BE.png
lh_CS.png
lh_DA.png
lh_ED.png
lh_GE.png
lh_GP.png
lh_LW.png
lh_MA.png
lh_ME.png
lh_PR.png
lh_RE.png
lh_SA.png
lh_SF.png

Other Writing ...

lh_AR.png
lh_ES.png
lh_MU.png
lh_SP.png

Reference details

Author(s) Year Title Reference View/Download

Les Hatton

2022d

Coding with meaningless symbols

Presented at SCSC June 9th, Wellcome Collection, LondonSCSC_09-Jun-2022.pdf

Synopsis and invited feedback

This work was or is being reviewed by domain-specific experts appointed independently.

If you would like to provide feedback just e-mail me here.

Synopsis Invited Feedback Importance (/10, author rated :-) )

We spend a great deal of time in computer science worrying about computer languages, their constituent symbols and their relative worth.

In and amongst all this angst, we don’t seem to have learned very much. We have a few new languages each decade to get excited about, but we still produce software which even charitably can be awful for no other reason than the management process which produced it. Sometimes it’s not only awful but lethal - you only have to think as far as the Boeing 737 MAX debacle which brought the whole concept of safety-critical software into disrepute. We can devote serious intellectual time to a particular software feature only to find the whole thing has been undermined by a spreadsheet jockey.

In 2020, my car got stolen because some “coder” had decided that keyless was the way to go. Perhaps that should be clueless. In 2022, my neighbour’s car (a different manufacturer) was stolen the same way. It takes around a minute. I expect the perpetrators of these software masterpieces will be busy on self-driving cars by now. Oh joy. Last week, I volunteered to enter results for my local athletics club only to find that a new client-server system had been introduced to “facilitate” this. I spent the afternoon sifting through web server “5xx” messages before sliding unconscious under the table. Will we ever learn anything? Do I even care anymore?

Since we clearly can’t deal with systems of symbols that mean something, what can we learn about systems of symbols when they have no meaning?

Turns out to be rather a lot.

None yet8

Related links

Related papers and links
Sorry, no links registered in database yet.

Auto-generated: $Revision: 1.64 $, $Date: 2022/05/20 08:41:34 $, Copyright Les Hatton 2001-