You are responsible for your choices all day every day for your entire life. I agree. It is a self-destructive behavior to think otherwise, in my opinion. How can a person grow if they don't take responsibility for their choices?
I think all papers are flawed in their own way. So it is not meant as a slight. It is actually my favorite programming related paper. That said:
I think Naur was just a bit to vague and assumed background knowledge of Gilbert Ryle where most people don't have any. I think a lot of people finish reading the paper and don't realize what Naur's notion of theory is or how his radical conclusions follow.
That isn't a question I can answer in a short post, but a couple quick hits:
1. Education is a business now, and responds to business incentives.
2. The postgrad environment is a mess, in part because of #1, in part because of its own internal issues, and in part because of fundamental supply and demand.
In your shoes I would make a decision to either fix/improve the situation or leave immediately.
If you decide for the former then make sure you have support from your management and own that decision. Be the one who turned the subpar division around. If it is as bad as you say you can hardly screw it up any worse. That's a privileged position to start from - difficult to fail.
I doubt your colleagues are really below average IQ - but perhaps their skills could be better. So teach them. Be the leader and mentor they likely never had. Have patience and build a team.
Fix the high impact, low effort problems first. Get some fast successes - they inspire and breed appetite for more. Don't exhaust your resources. Chip away one small problem at a time. It adds up faster than you think.
Create a vision for where you want to be in one year. Communicate that goal at every opportunity. Believe in it and other people will believe as well. It doesn't matter if you reach it within an arbitrary deadline - it matters that it exists in the first place.
Complexity exists in interaction between parts - not necessarily the parts themselves. Breaking down a project do not take those interactions into account.
Even if we were to try considering interactions we would fail. Like the weather, and other topics in the complex systems domain, software is sensitive to initial conditions. A small change in input (change in data or code) creates a large change in output.
We generally accept the upper bound on weather forecast to be 7 days and even then we might bring an umbrella just in case. Forecasting software many months into the future is futile - if taken at face value. Used as a general guideline it is usually ok.
A paradigm shift is needed. Both inside and outside the industry. Software is not industrial construction, hence the same logic (project management) do not apply.
Software is creation, conduction and orchestration. Not production or manufacturing. We are not teams of architect, builders and operators. We are musicians in a orchestra.
I agreed with you all the way until the last part about symphony, that is how you lose the attention of managers and leader types. majority of software is not a symphony rather a race car held together by ziptie and ducktapes just well enough to give a feel of something big in behind the curtains.
this is especially true if you consider the incremental work projects take on. THAT incremental work IS forecast-able. problem is often all the information need to be able to make that forecast is not in one place & the discovery process is often left unaccounted accidentally or on purpose to commit to tighter deadlines. add to that changing requirements and you have the state of software estimation we are in.
You're right - not the best analogy in this case. Not sure about the race car though. I will think about that. Analogies aside...
Let's agree that estimation is possible to a certain degree. We know this and accept the inherent uncertainty.
Modern project management is whole sale copied from industrial construction and manufacturing. It seems no one stopped to ask whether the same logic applies to software creation. And it doesn't.
The business side of IT is stuck in a mental model build on construction and manufacturing. Yet the process of creating software contains neither of those concepts with the exception of automated build and deploy (and costs for those are negligible).
It is also interesting that no distinct vocabulary for software exists. We build, deploy, construct, have factories and so forth. Again copied from disciplines which are complicated - but not complex.
It is not possible to obtain the information you refer to by analysis. That's a property of a complex system. Analysis of parts neglects the interaction between parts and in software more or less everything is connected.
This is one of the reasons why we cannot forecast weather and why we cannot reliably estimate software.
Now, if I start my explanation this way I'm also sure to lose their attention. So what do we do? Which intellectual approach will captivate these people, retain their attention and at least plant a seed of doubt in the established way of working?
Freedom of speech is absolute. One cannot outlaw what one does not want to hear. If you want your freedom to speak you are required to let other people speak. It's really that simple.
Hate does not go away by outlawing. It only makes martyrs of those impacted by the law.
The only way to fight bigotry is with information and enlightenment. It is a fight that will never stop and there are no short cuts.
One would have thought we, as a species, would have learned that by now.
I've heard lot of Americans defending that line as if "freedom of speech" was literally an unconditional universal right given by God to the human race.
Freedom of speech is either nonexistent or heavily restricted in most places because total freedom inevitably ends up with other people losing their own freedom/rights.
It's illegal and punishable by law to be openly homophobic in France. it's illegal and punishable by law to be openly nazi in Germany.
>I've heard lot of Americans defending that line as if "freedom of speech" was literally an unconditional universal right given by God to the human race.
Freedom of speech is an unconditional universal right given by God to the human race. The government taking away your rights does not mean those rights do not intrinsically exist.
>It's illegal and punishable by law to be openly homophobic in France.
I don't think you have read much Voltaire by the way, he was very much pro tolerance and anti hate. People love to brandish "freedom of speech" without understanding neither its history nor its meaning.
It's almost comically opposed to hate speech actually, let Voltaire out of this.
I wouldn't be surprised if the only thing you know about Voltaire is this misattributed quote that everybody like to parade with:
> I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
> Freedom of speech is an unconditional universal right given by God to the human race.
Which God ?
Do you also complain about the government taking your rights away when they tell you not to drive the wrong way on the interstate after drinking half a bottle of vodka ?
Recognizing a legal right to think is only a pretext for someone to justify taking that right away. Of course you can think freely, and it's ridiculous to even imply that taking that away is an option through stating so in the law.
Obviously homophobia is wrong, the problem with this kind of thinking is that there isn't any real evidence that outlawing speech protects people's rights. Rights are not given by anyone's graceful speech - that's why they're rights.
> Recognizing a legal right to think is only a pretext for someone to justify taking that right away. Of course you can think freely, and it's ridiculous to even imply that taking that away is an option through stating so in the law.
Have you heard of the Lumières ? These principles basically created modern Europe, but sure, it's just a trick to steal your freedom of thought...
> there isn't any real evidence that outlawing speech protects people's rights.
Plenty of people are being harassed in public for their sexuality, race, etc. you don't need a 20 years long control study to prove that outlawing hate speech will improve their rights.
> Rights are not given by anyone's graceful speech - that's why they're rights.
? People wrote the laws. Rights are made up, they're not universal constants
> Plenty of people are being harassed in public for their sexuality, race, etc.
Harassment, regardless of motive, is illegal. Is there a need to make it more illegal?
> you don't need a 20 years long control study to prove that outlawing hate speech will improve their rights.
Restricting a collective right does in no way grant more rights to a minority. It may (superficially and short term) improve their lives but do you really thing people will be less hateful from being told they are hateful? I always found that conclusion odd
"Hate" is fuzzy. Some Jews believe hate is any kind of critique of Israel. "Racism" is fuzzy. Some black people believe it is racist to dance a certain way if you're not black. "Sexism" is fuzzy. Some women believe they have been violated by a compliment.
Definitions change. Most of the time irrationally. What was well-intentioned yesterday becomes hateful tomorrow.
This is a slippery slope my friend. Not many things in life are absolute but freedom to speak your mind must be one of them.
> Plenty of people are being harassed in public for their sexuality, race, etc. you don't need a 20 years long control study to prove that outlawing hate speech will improve their rights.
Being harassed is wrong and illegal but what I meant to say is that it doesn't take your rights away. These two things are fundamentally separate. Someone breaking your rights does not mean that you then don't have them under the law. Which is the reason I wrote this:
> Rights are not given by anyone's graceful speech - that's why they're rights.
Because even though people codify laws they write them into law for a reason, so that the current mainstream discourse or some refuse someone throws at you cannot easily take them away. Hopefully I'm making myself clearer in that regard, since it's not the kind of thing I wanted to equate. I definitely wasn't asking for the requirement of any kind of long study on this topic.
I think you lack the historical culture and can't understand the context of these texts. If these texts were revolutionary at the time it's because they were not enforced before. You could be legally imprisoned for your thoughts (which you had or people thought you had), and it still is the case in many places around the world.
> Hating someone is an opinion. It is not an act of violence.
> What good is an opinion if you cannot express it?
So which is it ? Because obviously walking around and insulting people based on their race or religion is an act of violence
Those statements are not in opposition to each other,
> Because obviously walking around and insulting people based on their race or religion is an act of violence
If you define an insult to be violent in the same way as taking a life then I see why we are so far from each other. I make a clear distinction between the two. Do you really think an insult is an act of violence? I'm curious why you would think that
Inciting to violence and performing a violent act is not the same thing. If they were one could defer responsibility to the actor who incited one to be violent. That ends all personal responsibility for ones own actions.
> I think you lack the historical culture and can't understand the context of these texts.
Such derogatory remarks does not further any conversation. I'm here to debate - to learn - to expose myself to different worlds. I hope you are as well. Question - don't assume.
In some parts of geography and history, freedom of speech did exist, including freedom of vile disagreeable speech, like the example you gave. The place used to be USA:
What a lot of people don't understand is that speech has a legal definition that is especially relevant in cases of libel or incitement. Once it can be considered speech, the content of that speech in public areas is allowed to vary under the first amendment in the US.
It's not splitting hairs, because this is routinely debated in courts all over the country. As for whether or not people having the ability to speak freely leads to a loss of rights, the US has been around for some time now and is pretty quickly gaining rights for people in the grand scheme of things. The suppression of speech has not fared the same, and both sides of the aisle can (hypocritically) point to suppression of speech leading to a loss or possible loss of rights. If we want to talk about speech and history, it's much easier to find examples of control that goes too far, and often a lot more quickly.
There is no society (existing or historical) where freedom of speech was absolute. There have always been consequences for some types of speech.
The US conception of freedom of speech is basically, "Your ideological speech is safe from government censorship, but not from anyone else's." And even that has been unevenly supported by courts over time.
So while your philosophy is interesting, it seems to have little to do with the way societies actually behave.
You are responsible for your actions - no one else. "But I did it because...". No. You chose to do it. You are responsible.
Other people are responsible for their actions. Not you.
She was/is right.