Hacker News Reader

Comment by dieterrams | Hacker News Reader

Software engineering isn't math research. While I'm not against making it easier to formally prove correctness, at the same time I'm not sure why you think it's so important. We've been doing pretty well without it. How do you justify your certainty that we need it?

View on HN

"How do you justify your certainty that we need it?"

Not OP but all pre-scientific crafts from medicine to construction have benefited considerably of application of formal methods. I don't see why software engineering a should be different.

How many doctors in the field are practicing formal methods these days beyond say statistics?

Anyways, surely SE as a field benefits from formal methods like other fields, whether applied by specialists or in the field by practitioners we can debate, but hopefully we can all agree SE isn't defined as just applying formal methods, that there is a lot in development that will never go near a formal spec.

Doctors are required to have extensive knowledge of chemistry, physics, and biology before even beginning medical school. Those are all highly scientific fields with centuries of practice behind them, not to mention medicine itself which is nearly as old as people are.

Yes, but computer scientists are required to take engineering physics also, as well as creative writing sometime. We are talking about the practice of medicine, and if you know any doctors, they aren't exactly very interested in math (they have a lot of other stuff to do!).

I'm not required to take any physics in my degree actually.

UW CSE requires first year engineer-level physics. I don't think that's unusual.

"we can all agree SE isn't defined as just applying formal methods, that there is a lot in development that will never go near a formal spec."

I've yet to see a field without artificial restraints that has abandoned need for human intuition and creativity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com