The Shape of Code

Including the word science in the term used to describe a research field creates an aura of scientific enterprise. Universities name departments “Computer Science” and creationist have adopted the term “Creation Science”. The word engineering is used when an aura with a practical hue is desired, e.g., “Software Engineering” and “Consciousness Engineering”.

Science and engineering theories/models are founded on the principle of reproducibility. A theory/model achieves its power by making predictions that are close enough to reality.

Computing/software is an amalgam of many fields, some of which do tick the boxes associated with science and/or engineering practices, e.g., the study of algorithms or designing hardware. Activities whose output is primarily derived from human activity (e.g., writing software) are bedevilled by the large performance variability of people. Software engineering is unlikely to ever become a real engineering discipline.

If the activity known as software engineering is not engineering, then what is it?

To me, software engineering appears to be a form of moral theology. My use of this term is derived from the 1988 paper Social Science as Moral Theology by Neil Postman.

Summarising the term moral theology via its two components, i.e., morality+theology, we have:

Morality is a system of rules that enable people to live and work together for mutual benefit. Social groups operate better when its members cooperate with each other based on established moral rules. A group operating with endemic within group lying and cheating is unlikely to survive for very long. People cannot always act selfishly, some level of altruism towards group members is needed to enable a group to flourish.

Development teams will perform better when its members cooperate with each other, as opposed to ignoring or mistreating each other. Failure to successfully work together increases the likelihood that the project the team are working on will failure; however, it is not life or death for those involved.

The requirements of group living, which are similar everywhere, produced similar moral systems around the world.

The requirements of team software development are similar everywhere, and there does appear to be a lot of similarity across recommended practices for team interaction (although I have not studied this is detail and don’t have much data).

Theology is the study of religious beliefs and practices, some of which do not include a god, e.g., Nontheism, Humanism, and Religious Naturalism.

Religious beliefs provide a means for people to make sense of their world, to infer reasons and intentions behind physical events. For instance, why it rains or doesn’t rain, or why there was plenty of animal prey during last week’s hunt but none today. These beliefs also fulfil various psychological and emotional wants or needs. The questions may have been similar in different places, but the answers were essentially invented, and so different societies have ended up with different gods and theologies.

Different religions do have some features in common, such as:

• Creation myths. In software companies, employees tell stories about the beliefs that caused the founders to create the company, and users of a programming language tell stories about the beliefs and aims of the language designer and the early travails of the language implementation.
• Imagined futures, e.g., we all go to heaven/hell: An imagined future of software developers is that source code is likely to be read by other developers, and code lives a long time. In reality, most source code has a brief and lonely existence.

A moral rule sometimes migrates to become a religious rule, which can slow the evolution of the rule when circumstances change. For instance, dietary restrictions (e.g., must not eat pork) are an adaptation to living in some environments.

In software development, the morals of an Agile methodology perfectly fitted the needs of the early Internet, where existing ways of doing things did not exist and nobody knew what customers really wanted. The signatories of the Agile manifesto now have their opinions treated like those of a prophet (these 17 prophets are now preaching various creeds).

Agile is not always the best methodology to use, with a Waterfall methodology being a better match for some environments.

Now that the Agile methodology has migrated to become a ‘religious’ dogma, the reaction to suggestions that an alternative methodology be used are often what one would expect to questioning a religious belief.

For me this is an evolving idea.