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Comment by shanghaiaway | Hacker News Reader

Software developers cannot sit down and design a new type of spacecraft engine.

That metaphor seemed like it was trying to show equivalent complexity, not that the jobs were interchangeable.

Engineers on a spacecraft needing to know that at a certain temperature a material contracts which changes the friction coefficient it has and increases the heat generated until two moving parts melt, seems to have the same equivalence as knowing that at a certain rate of incoming messages your cache technology starts hitting a race condition where messages are double sent and now the downstream work is duplicated but not able to be correlated.

All of this is different from ambiguous wording in natural language, where the ambiguity might even be the intent.

Thermal contraction would typically not change a particular part/material’s coefficient of friction but rather would potentially decreasing acting normal force. Friction is reduced because contact decreases not because some material characteristic changes.

Pedantic maybe, but it does reiterate the point that a software dev couldn’t design a spacecraft.

But that has nothing to do with what I was saying. I was saying that engineering is different from writing. There is no reasonable interpretation of what I wrote that is saying that different types of engineers could do each other's jobs.

So the entire thread is unreasonable.

I think you may be missing the point. I was trying to give an example of complexity, not trying to prove that a software engineer could casually walk up and design a spaceship.

The OP's point was that both types of engineering are of similar complexity when contrasted to writing in a natural language

I was obviously not trying to suggest that.

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