[ox-en] the Deleuzian engineer
- From: John Bywater <john.bywater appropriatesoftwarefoundation.org>
- Date: 26 Jan 2004 15:37:40 +0000
Dear Niall,
As I have said many times, the true engineer chooses the best tools
available. Not for political, legal nor philosophical grounds nor
even cost within reason. If one doesn't do that, one must accept they
are a substandard programmer & engineer and must especially accept
that one has absolutely no right whatsoever to preach their
superiority to others who are less self-castrated.
As you seem to repeat yourself most often, and to hold the right to
preach your superiority to us all daily at the highest pitch, ought I
merely to conclude that you are the least self-castrated person on this
list, should castration exist on a continuum, and a veritable Superman
engineer?
No. Your comments are mostly cod.
Engineering is about making things work, including the tools, the ideas,
the legal concerns, and the money. Engineering is always-already social,
and consequently immediately political. (Or, perhaps you normally find
when your solutions don't work that the tools are to blame?) In any
case, the discriminant in engineering of any sort is the pragmatic:
'does it work?' and not the dogmatic: 'is it correct?'
(Hence, for example, the various intensities surrounding unit
testing/test first/test driven practice in software engineering, which
essentially defines a region in 'implementation space' where the
unit-under-test is said to be working, and which displaces the tiresome
question: is this unit correct?).
Although I would expect from reading your utterances that you don't read
them, amongst others, Deleuze and Guattari expound a wonderful
philosophy of pragmatics, of time, of networks of intensity, of desirous
machines, of an extraordinary conceptual richness that only the dimmest
dimwit would dismiss, and only the most devine of imaginations wouldn't
find nutritious.
As you always assert 'that which is correct' (despite your utterances
sometimes merely unformed, othertimes only inaccurate), you demonstrate
an attitude at odds with the figure of the capable engineer, at least
the one that I like to love.
We see all of this with your posturing - yet broken - conjunction of the
'true engineer'.
It is the case that for any object subjected to being 'engineered',
unless all the forces are considered, the resulting structure cannot be
expected to resolve those forces, and will be torn down by them as a
simple matter of time.
Your objective construction 'true engineer' would seem to be a trivial
case of such engineering failure.
Capable engineers are always cobbled together, they are the result of a
succession of reflexive hacks, of incomplete implementations that
changed their intention, and are never true as an arrow, or a compass,
or a wheel, might be true. They know they make mistakes, and watch out
for them. This produces, above all else, a visibly cautious approach.
And they preserve their capabilities (or their freedoms) by fixing what
they find broken about themselves as circumstances vary (suddenly Ward
Cunningham's introduction to The Pragmatic Programmer springs to mind)
and, in some delightful cases - and this would indeed seem to constitute
the new resonant pole within the sphere of production's manifold modes -
each other.
As Nietzsche said, you need chaos inside you to give birth to a chaotic
star. Don't waste yours backing out such crap.
John Bywater.