On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 17:06 -0500, Steve Schafer wrote: > On Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:21:57 -0800, you wrote: > > >Where, in the history of western civilization, has there ever been an > >engineering discipline whose adherents were permitted to remain ignorant > >of the basic mathematical terminology and methodology that their > >enterprise is founded on? > > Umm, all of them?
Really. So the engineer who designed the apartment building I'm in at the moment didn't know any physics, thought `tensor' was a scary math term irrelevant to practical, real-world engineering, and will only read books on engineering that replace the other scary technical term `vector' with point-direction-value-thingy? I think I'm going to sleep under the stars tonight... > >No one may be a structural engineer, and remain ignorant of physics. No > >one may be a chemical engineer, and remain ignorant of chemistry. Why > >on earth should any one be permitted to be a software engineer, and > >remain ignorant of computing science? > > Do you know any actual working structural or chemical engineers? Um, no. I try to avoid people as much as possible; computers at least make sense. Also anything else to do with the real world :) > Most > engineering disciplines require a basic grasp of the underlying theory, > yes, but not much beyond that. Perhaps I should have said `completely ignorant'? Or do you think that join . join = join . fmap join is of the same level of theoretical depth as quantum orbital mechanics? > Pretty much everything else is covered by > rules (either rules of thumb or published standards). > Show me an electrical engineer who can explain the physics of a pn > junction and how it acts as a rectifier, or a civil engineer who can > explain why the stress/strain curve of a steel beam has the shape that > it does, Again, do engineers know *what* stress is? Do they understand terms like `tensor'? Those things are the rough equivalents of terms like `monoid'. jcc _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
