Re: [ox-en] the Deleuzian engineer
- From: "Niall Douglas" <s_fsfeurope2 nedprod.com>
- Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 01:39:04 -0000
On 26 Jan 2004 at 15:37, John Bywater wrote:
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?
Hardly. I am only experienced in a very few programming languages and
am still a relative newbie to Unix. However I feel I am reasonably
competent within what I know I can do.
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?'
I think you are confusing ideal engineering with what it is in real
life. Ideally there'd be no financial, material, manpower and
especially managerial constraints - just the engineer and his/her
problem to be solved.
However what's most important here is that any good engineer does not
deliberately add another constraint to the process when there is no
need for it.
To do so is akin to stating "We shall write this software entirely in
assembler because I am politically opposed to everything else". While
it could be an excellent piece of software, it would likely be poorer
engineering because manipulating complexity in assembler gets
exponentially harder with rising complexity.
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.
I've only heard of them through their anti-capitalist arguments and
to be quite frank, I had dismissed their theories as mad and possibly
dangerous like Nietzsche's. But it was some time ago and I was
reading another person's account of them, so I could be very wrong.
Can you propose some reading material, preferably on the web as I
already have a backlog of ten tomes on my reading list?
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.
The difference between a capable engineer and and excellent engineer
is that the work of the latter makes its creator's mistakes very
obvious.
As Nietzsche said, you need chaos inside you to give birth to a
chaotic star. Don't waste yours backing out such crap.
Creativity comes solely from chaos. The most creative entity is
necessarily the most chaotic and yet ordered of things.
Cheers,
Niall