I am still going to Japan on vacation

Torii at sunset

This is curenty a relatively bold thing to say.

As tempus is want to fugit it is likely this post will lose both its impact and meaning very quickly.

Japan has suffered its biggest earthquake ever. It triggered a huge Tsunami that wrecked even more damage, death and destruction.
Currently over 10,000 are dead and further 10,000 are missing.
It is a horrible tragedy.

And on top of this there has been an accident at a nuclear facility north of Tokyo that has pumped radioactive Iodine into the environment.

So why on earth would I still be going to Japan on vacation?
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My atheism is an informed choice

The Grauniad online has a bunch of articles about “Can we choose what we believe”.
This is a rather interesting question.

Especially if, like me, you believe you have little conscious choice in what you believe.
[That entire sentence, and most of this discussion, is a nightmare of circular language!]

I got to the question via PZ Myers blog post linking to the Grauniad article by Harriet Baber.

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Technical people can never be creative…. WTF?

“What you need to learn is that being creative is not enough in this business. You have to become technical. Creative people are born creative – you’re lucky. Technical people however can never be creative. It’s something they’ll never get. You can’t buy it, find it, study it – you’re born with it. Too many creative people don’t want to learn how to be technical, so what happens? They become dependent on technical people. Become technical, you can learn that.
If you’re creative and technical, you’re unstoppable.”
- Robert Rodriguez (emphasis mine)

This quote was sent around work at precisely the wrong time.
The Tech team had been working for 16 hour days, and in some cases 30 hour days, for a total of three weeks without a break, scrambling hard to meet hard deadlines.
The entire tech team almost walked out.
[By this time we were too exhausted to move ;) ]
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… and Hitchens isn’t helping matters either – Stating the case for justice

Well, not as much as he could.

In his piece in Newsweek, calling for the Pope to be brought to justice for his complicity in the paedophile scandal he had this to say;

The so-called Vatican City, a political nonentity covering about 0.17 square miles of Rome, was created by Benito Mussolini in 1929 as part of his sweetheart deal between fascism and the papacy. It is the last survival of the political architecture of the Axis powers.

This is, of course, an ad hominem attack against the legitimacy of the Papal State.

Hitchens should really know better than to use the failed rhetorical device of the Christian vox populi against itself.
Unless he is using it in a veiled attempt at irony, it has no real purpose in his piece.
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Fisking Fitzgerald – Dawkins gets under the skin (…again)

I stumbled across this attack piece on Huffington Post.
I find it slightly surprisingly for a left-leaning organisation to publish such a blatant a attack piece directed at Richard Dawkins.
And it is such plainly daft, anti-atheist, bigoted nonsense that it deserves a thorough fisking.

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Software Development is ….

… a Science?

It is most definitely not a science.
Science requires the rigorous confines of the scientific method.

As an atheist who often rants against pseudoscientific and mystical thinking, I can say categorically that Software Development cannot be considered a science as it does not in any way base itself in any way on (dis)provable hypotheses and evidence.

A lot of people consider it a science because the discipline exists purely because of scientific advancements.
[And greatly contributes to further scientific advancement.]

But this is a ludicrous as calling an Olympic swimmer a scientist because he is proving the hypotheses of fluid dynamics.

So, no, not a science.

… Engineering?

The language of software development is very engineering related.
We talk about building.
We talk about construction.
We talk about infrastructure.
We talk about design.
We talk about architecture.

To the layman this sounds similar to the language used to build bridges, boats and planes.
But the similarity is totally superficial.
Software Development as a discipline is extremely new, compared to masonry, and so appropriated existing language as metaphors for similarly scoped, but entirely different, tasks.

It may be that building software in the 70s took a long time, but now it is instantaneous.
The software infrastructure of a distributed server farm may be impressive, but not to the scale and magnificence of the catacombs.

Using the tired old metaphors of engineering in today’s world just does not work as well.

So, no, not engineering.

… an Art?

There is without a doubt high creativity at work in good Software Development.
Although it is in a manner that those outside of the discipline would rarely comprehend or appreciate.

Seeing my first MVC application, in the wild rather than in the dry leaves of some academic tome, was, for me, a work of beauty equivalent to a Caravaggio.
Stupendous and awe-inspiring in its depth of vision.

But, even so, software development can never be as nebulous or personally subjective as art.

True, there are many debates in software development, loose vs. strict typing, procedural vs. functional vs. object-oriented programming, etc.
But these are just minor disagreements compared to the pointillists vs. synthetist disagreements of post-impressionism. [See van Gogh vs. Gaugin]

Even the most partisan of software developers would agree that an opposing concept has some merit. [Excepting Richard Stallman, of course. :P ]

Something no artistic difference would ever permit.

And finally, and most damningly, with art you need not be an artist, or even remotely artistic, to truly appreciate the beauty of the art.

So, no, not art.

So what the hell is it then?

This is a tough question.
It does not naturally fit any of the above descriptions neatly.
It is like science in its approach, but without needing to prove a hypothesis.
It is like engineering in implementation, but without actually building something physical.
And it is like art in its intricate beauty, but it cannot be appreciate fully by the layman.

Software Development is a craft

A software developer has a wealth of experience and skill to bring to bear on the writing of software.
And the skill that software developers have grows over time with experience.
It is not an unskilled profession.

It is a craft and will be for quite some time to come.