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Comment by D-Machine | Hacker News Reader

I think it is worse than that. Science is a process for resolving disagreements, ambiguity, and uncertainty, and also for discovering abstractions (patterns) among phenomena. It is social and can not be reduced to a binary / digital file, as it is dynamic and ongoing, and, fundamentally, exploratory.

Software is a static program and basically none of these things.

Software development is kind of like science, in some ways, in that you discover abstractions and patterns, and this requires resolving disagreements and ambiguity between you and your users, but in the end, the user demands are usually fairly concrete and specific (though no one may know how to express those demands precisely, initially), and the process is not really exploratory in the way science is.

It just really isn't a very good comparison IMO.

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I actually disagree that software is a static program. If a program always have the same behaviour, it's a pretty bad program. You need inputs and, as demonstrated by the recent LLM inputs, parameters you can tune to correctly address a specific context.

I would also contest the point about science being social. To me, science is the interplay between social constructions and physical reality. Which is why tests and experiments are so fundamental. Your point about software development as kind of like science is spot on: why not be exploratory/empirical in software development? Couldn't we imagine an LLM, say, that would go out and try to solve a question we frame? This seems strikingly close to autoresearch [1]

[1]: https://github.com/karpathy/autoresearch

> If a program always have the same behaviour, it's a pretty bad program

This is false in far more cases than the cases where it is true, and even in the cases where you are right, you still usually want similar behaviour.

> You need inputs and, as demonstrated by the recent LLM inputs, parameters you can tune to correctly address a specific context

You seem very confused about what "static" means here.

> I would also contest the point about science being social. To me, science is the interplay between social constructions and physical reality.

Well, almost all philosophers of science would disagree with you, and IMO this sentence immediately contradicts itself.

Frankly, you should really work on learning to write more coherently and carefully. You maybe have some good ideas, but they are being communicated extremely poorly and inconsistently.

> Science is a process for resolving disagreements, ambiguity, and uncertainty ... It is social

More dramatically stated as: Science progresses one funeral at a time.

> An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

Ironically, Max Planck's funeral was in 1947.

Disclosure: Old scientist.

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