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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

This cynicism in this thread is disappointing. Of course, the things that this watch shows can easily be achieved by the most rudimentary computer but imagine the patience and skill needed to mechanically move sunrise and sunsets. Doing complex calculations all through gears and fitting it in a tiny wristwatch.

It can be regarded as a pinnacle of human engineering. I am sure it's possible to draw parallels with equally complex software but thinking of the effort involved in making this, there would hardly be any equivalent.

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> I am sure it's possible to draw parallels with equally complex software

Absolutely - I mean which programmer wouldn't admire the mechanics of an Enigma, a Z3 or any mechanical calculator.

I sometimes use an Abacus or a sliding rule - just for fun!

> It can be regarded as a pinnacle of human engineering

I would argue it is pinnacle of art and not of engineering.

Or a bit of both really. I am impressed by the work put into it and the actual engineering, though it does feel like a piece of art as well.

I think their point was that engineering is the process of finding the most efficient way to accomplish a given goal given the whole of science and technology with which to accomplish it. In this way, a purely mechanical watch attempting such complex calculations is suboptimal. As such, it's existence is a form of art -- it is engineering only in the sense that the restrictions imposed are themselves non-optimal (for instance, the requirement that purely mechanical mechanisms be used). Something at the pinnacle of engineering would seek to optimise not only the solution, but also the requirements.

Why is engineering restricted to finding the most efficient way? That sounds straight out of the critiques of the Cult of Efficiency. In my opinion, Engineering is a process applicable to any goals, efficiency being just one possibility; hence I much prefer Wikipedia's definition:

Engineering is the application of mathematics, as well as scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge to invent, innovate, design, build, maintain, research, and improve structures, machines, tools, systems, components, materials, processes, solutions, and organizations.

If you don't allow that kind of restrictions, many modern bridges should be consider art by that logic because "while looking good and distinct" was one of their design goals.

Precisely. They are both art and engineering -- that's the point. Generally, the art aspect consists of the aesthetic restrictions you've placed on your engineering efforts.

restricting a machine to mechanical operations takes severe engineering effort - what you are doing is just playing with words. you can program to display a time on a watch running Python inside - but you probably would have to research for years before coming up with a reliable and usable mechanical watch - not to mention the advanced features at display here.

Playing with words is the point, in this case. The distinctions between art and engineering are as real as the words we use to describe them.

Developing a mechanical way of doing this from scratch is much more efficient than developing the entire stack of technology abstraction layers (from transistors to CPUs to computer engineering to LEDs to OSes to programming languages and runtimes, etc.) to achieve this digitally.

Some spinning weals, gears, and springs are much much much more efficient!

And if the goal is to compute the position of the stars mechanically, with no electricity? By your definition, it suddenly becomes engineering again.

Does that mean all programs written in anything but C are "art" and not "engineering"?

Unfortunately most programs fail to be art for aesthetic reasons :-)

I can agree the most of them aren't engineering either.

Some pieces of art are so bad they're good and the same is true of software: http://ioccc.org/

Engineering is art

It's a pinnacle of engineering in the same way that a vehicle made entirely of jello is. Impressive? Extremely. Interesting? Very! Practical? Not so much.

I think most of the detraction comes from people who think that impressive things must also be useful or practical.

I think your underplaying the role of software in designing this. It's not actually difficult to design something like this anymore. They also avoided mentioning how accurate it actually was because it's 99% art 1% utility.

> I think you're :-)

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