Naval Architects of Lore May Have Been Right After All
gcaptain.com
gcaptain.com
The phrase "naval architects of lore" would mean the old naval architects themselves, not the knowledge they had. While that definition works, it's unusual. "X of yore" is much more common for this situation.
As a rough approximation, compare the n-gram population of "of yore vs "of lore", from https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=of+lore%2Cof+y... . "Of yore" occurs several times more often.
For another approximation, Google finds only 4 matches for "engineers of lore" and 84 for "engineers of yore". (I couldn't search for "architects of yore" since all of the matches were either to this article, or to the "Architects of Lore" series by Kayara Ingham.)
Other variants are "The macho, look-at-me, gun-slinging Dallas Cowboys of lore and legend", "Also, Wendell had suggested that if they were going to die in a bunker, they better be ready and depart the earth like the cowboys of lore with their boots on.", "The pirates of lore have been romanticized as dashing and daring adventurers.", "Worries of cheap labour from Eastern Europe, the Polish plumbers of lore, burgeoned with the possibility of Bulgarians and Romanians joining the ranks of those willing to work for lower wages and longer hours than the local labour force.", "Ghat (pronounced "rat" by Bastien) was a trading center for the great camel caravans of lore, bringing ivory, gold, salt, and slaves from the sub-Sahara..", and "These were the Clippers [aircraft] of lore that captured the imagination through radio shows and even movies of that era."
These are examples of "X mentioned in lore" not "X who create lore", and where "lore" isn't synonymous with myths.
I also found "A historic landmark and famed work of San Francisco architect of lore Willis Polk" at http://sf.curbed.com/tags/willis-polk , which is an example of a building architect who features in lore.
I suppose naval architecture has its own traditions, a lore of heroes, conflict, inventive solution and disaster. hmmm the tale of the Titanic is one of the most mythic events of modern times - and naval architecture is right at the center.
Does programming have lore? i.e. mythic stories? Figures like Turing and Babbage certainly have mythic stature, but don't seem quite right. Maybe something descended from the telegraph operators of Edison's era. Or perhaps some science fiction characters (like DNA on asking the right question), or Murphy's Law?
Perhaps we move so fast (though often reinventing unnecessarily) that lore becomes dated too quickly?
http://www.filfre.net/ is going through the history of ludic games, including discussion of the lore associated with specific games. There are stories about IBM's "Black Team" ("more than one programmer was reduced to tears while having his code evaluated by the Black Team.") Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine". Robert X. Cringely's "Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date" shouldn't be read as a history book but a collection of lore about Silicon Valley.
Also, I picked "engineers" and "plumbers" to show real-world examples of non-universal elements. "Architect" is another non-universal.
Regarding naval architects, there's Bushnell's Turtle, Ericsson's Monitor, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Eastern .. and that's just from my general cultural knowledge. I assume that actual naval architects have more lore.
Though some of those are more industry business lore than programming lore (maybe a quibble).
BTW: A universal can be an element within a story, rather than the subject. For example, anti-authoritarianism is a universal concept, and a strong theme in many of the stories.
Folklore.org - how more perfect a counter to "we have no lore"? Also, reminded me of the pay-per-LoC one, and the guy who removed several thousand. This one speaks directly to a technical aspect of programming, as well as being anti-authoritarian.
The Icelandic sagas are surely part of lore, do you agree? They are prose history, and not stories of mythology. It say that Flóki Vilgerðarson climbed the mountain Hornatær, looked out, and only saw ice, which is why he named it Iceland.
This and many other stories in the sagas do not try to express some universal concept, other than being how people lived. They don't all describe some sort of hero's journey or quest.
I see no reason to imbue the term lore with that extra meaning. Certainly some of the stories describe anti-authoritarianism. But that it not unique to myths and legend. Real people can also be anti-authoritarian, so histories will also include accounts of anti-authoritarianism.
Getting back to "lore", my last resort is to look up its meaning: a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth.
Not stories or personages at all! For coding, it could include rules of thumbs and aphorisms like the first rule of optimisation, premature optimisation, divide and conquer, YAGNI, etc.
The analogous coders of lore might be the implicit originator of those aphorisms (like the sage of the tao te ching), and attributed authors like Knuth are just a connecting link.
This would be in a similar category to folk wisdom and old wive's tales, that often turn out to have something to them, even when their explicit reasoning is illogical or clearly wrong. It's often passed on because - for whatever reason - things turn out better when following it.
> Although the bulbous bow concept is credited to David W. Taylor, a naval architect who served as Chief Constructor of the United States Navy during the First World War and who used the concept (known as a bulbous forefoot) in his design of the USS Delaware, which entered service in 1910, there are earlier examples.
Continuing,
> The modern bulbous bow was developed by Dr. Takao Inui at the University of Tokyo during the 1950s and 1960s, ... It was eventually found that drag could be reduced by about five percent. Experimentation and refinement slowly improved the geometry of bulbous bows, but they were not widely exploited until computer modelling techniques enabled researchers at the University of British Columbia to increase their performance to a practical level in the 1980s.
I presume the experiments in the 1950s and 1960s were done experimentally, and the later CFDs validated through experiment. The WP page links to http://www.dieselduck.info/library/01%20articles/bulbous_bow... which says "Today, to see a large ship without a bulbous bow is a rare sight indeed. Their results have been proven over countless thousands of deep ocean miles in all kinds of weather by all kinds of vessels."
Thus, color me doubtful that this CFD run is meaningful.
I submitted another article that basically talked about which shipping is in a big downturn and any efficiencies might help.