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Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

I wonder sometimes if this is the cause or effect of the lack of consensus in software engineering. There are so many topics about which the software engineering community is somewhat split. Typechecked or not typechecked, SQL or Nosql, Object Oriented or Functional. The pendulum swings between them over time but no real established consensus get's established.

Is the lack of consensus why we don't have more curated knowledge? Or is the lack of curated knowledge the reason we don't have more consensus?

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More than that I feel there is hidden/lost knowledge. For example real world software design documents are so hard to come by, I think they must be one of the closest guarded things in software companies. The history of major software development projects in the industry has simply been lost to us.

I’m pretty sure the main reasons such documents are not public are: Either nobody documented it or the document is badly written. So it is just too embarrassing.

> ...the document is badly written. So it is just too embarrassing.

At risk of being accused of being on the A.I. hype train, it seems like having a writing bot that could distill the important points out of poorly written documents, and state them more clearly would be a huge boon. Hopefully it would allow an iterative process where someone could hone their offering to a point where they felt okay releasing it.

For software documentation, “badly written” often means that it’s ambiguous, is missing information, and/or is contradictory. AI can’t really help with that.

I would think that a good AI could actually point out missing and ambiguous information and allow an iterative process where a programmer could more easily fill in the blanks before resubmitting it for another round.

Is "good AI" now the new "true Scotsman"?

You mean the "sufficiently smart compiler"?

Yes, ChatGPT is good enough to help writing this stuff. It is still work though. Work which is not valued much and which most engineers like to avoid.

Personally, I like it. For me, there is no better way to achieve clarity than writing about something. So I don’t really understand why they like to avoid it. They apparently value clarity less than I do but that doesn’t explain it. “Everybody is different“ doesn’t really explain anything.

I feel confident that an AI trying to read that info back would suffer the same limitations as any human. What is important depends completely on the audience and why they are reading. The sum of all important points to all people at all times is equal to the content of the computer program itself.

I think every major split would still be a topic broad enough for a curated body of knowledge.

Unfortunately, I think the author is spot on, with the answer to why we don't have such kinds of work available, as he writes: "the work is hard and unrewarding".

It doesn't make sense to me that there should be consensus. People have diverse opinions and values, and these topics are highly situational and subjective rather than neatly, objectively, universally right or wrong.

If there is nigh-unanimous agreement. Asserting the same narrative, arguing the same arguments.

Well that's suspicious. That's a sign of something.

In other engineering disciplines, it means there are agreed upon engineering principles that practitioners are obligated to apply.

Good example of why "engineering" only works as a loose metaphor and isn't meaningfully similar enough with software for direct comparisons.

Building things with matter needs to adhere to fixed principles corresponding to hard laws of physics. Working with bits is a different ballgame. It's creativity, psychology, improvisation. It's gardening.

Physics matters, but any engineering discipline dictates principles and practices beyond merely what is demanded by physics.

> It's gardening.

Let a thousand bad analogies bloom!

imo we've not settled on a meta as the game is relatively new, has been changing a lot over the decades, they take a long time to play and lots of the learnings are fairly hidden in companies.

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