TITLE: Them's Fighting Words
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 02, 2008  2:03 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
This provocative statement appears in the Roly Perera
<A HREF="http://dynamicaspects.com/blog/2006/11/art-of-science-of-software.html">
   essay</A>
that I
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2008-03.html#e2008-03-01T15_39_13.htm">
   mentioned recently</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
All I know is that if there is a place for post-modernist,
lit-crit, social constructivist thinking in the modern
world, it's nowhere near the field of computing.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Robert Biddle and James Noble may have a duel
<A HREF="http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~kjx/papers/nopp.pdf">
   on their hands</A>
(PDF)!  I think that we have the makings of an outstanding
<A HREF="http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2008/cfp_panels.html">
   OOPSLA 2008 panel</A>.

I'd certainly like to hear more from Perera if he has more
ideas of this sort:

<BLOCKQUOTE>
... emergent behaviours are in a sense dual to the
<EM>requirements</EM> on a solution.  Requirements are
known and <STRONG>obligate</STRONG> the system in certain
ways, whereas emergent behaviours ("emergents", one could
call them) are those which are <STRONG>permitted</STRONG>
by the system, but which were not known <EM>a priori</EM>.
</BLOCKQUOTE>

This is an interesting analogy, one I'd like to think more
about.  For some reason, it reminds of Jon Postel's dictum
about protocol design, "Be liberal in what you accept, and
conservative in what you send" and Bertrand Meyer's ideas
about design by contract.
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