Re: [xml-dev] [offtopic] The Airplane Example (was Re: [xml-dev]Streaming XML)

[Rick Marshall <rjm@zenucom.com>]

i think a better example than the airplane one discussed here, is the 
vibrating bridge that destoyed itself in high winds, or any of the 
amazing engineering feats in the recently shown tv series (brooklyn 
bridge, panama canal, etc).

the reason i say this is that they all have the elements that are 
important - money, politics, disaster, engineering (somewhere). but most 
importantly the results of the successes and failures all fed into the 
engineering education systems and are passed on by the institutions to 
each new generation of engineers. learning by magazine or experience (or 
even a few good books) will never replace the disciplined study of a 
formal education at the university of technical level. mainly because 
those who design the courses (hopefully) make sure that your education 
is broad and covers areas that you wouldn't normally follow if you just 
pursued your interests.

the challenge remains to develop and maintain software engineering and 
computer science courses that do the same (i know there's lots out 
there, i've been through the system) and the incentive for young 
prospective software people to undertake them. maybe professional 
licencing and liability would be a good idea.

my own experience is that it can be difficult to introduce programmers 
to xml technologies because they see it as yet another language to learn 
and they're happy with what they've got. without suitable education on 
their part it can be difficult to find a common language to explain the 
benefits and other reasons for our approach. the same problems exist in 
the rdbms world and even in the c world.

rick

Michael Champion wrote:

>On Sat, 01 Jan 2005 14:57:05 +0000, Bill de hÓra
><bill.dehora@propylon.com> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>On the other hand trying to delineate what's engineering and what's
>>alchemy in a software sense is no bad thing 
>>    
>>
>
>I'm not sure I follow.  To me, it's not clear what is alchemy and what
>is engineering and what is computer science in the real world.  The
>Cali plane crash example seems to illustrate that -- the on-board
>software worked as designed, and the design was rational, it just made
>assumptions about a) the distribution of navigation beacons and b) the
>attention to detail on the part of the pilots that turned out to be
>over-optimistic.  Is this engineering or alchemy?  I'm not sure. 
>Benjamin Franz seems to think that best practices are clear and a good
>process could have caught these unrealistic assumptions in advance. 
>Maybe, but I have a feeling that "best practice" is more of a
>collection of hard lessons learned from investigating disasters, and
>anticipating new flaws at the design phase is more in the realm of
>alchemy than engineering.  But maybe this is just a matter of using
>slippery and value laden words in inconsistent ways, not real
>disagreement.
>
>But remember that Newton was an alchemist, and Kepler was an
>astrologer :-)  So, it probably is worth trying to delineate
>engineering from alchemy, but I expect the line to be pretty fuzzy.
>
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