Keith Moore wrote:
<snip>
the market has sight. market analysts have hind-sight.
engineering is about fore-sight. therein lies a world of
difference in roles and responsibilities.
The fore-sight of any role is constrained by assumptions. An engineer who
designs a building to withstand a collision with a 707 suddenly has a lot
more hindsight (than fore-sight) when it is hit with a 767. So let's
acknowledge there is no such thing as perfect fore-sight for any role, only
better or worse given a set of assumptions.
there is no perfect foresight. there is no perfect hindsight either.
nor is the market either efficient or reliable at choosing good solutions.
It appears the word "market" is overloaded with lots of social/political
ideology so rather than go down that road, let me redirect the point by
simply observing that running code allows the designer(s) to get
feedback about a design and its implementation implications, which is
the point about "letting the market decide". Many can imagine a "better"
design for some problem space, according to some fitness bias we have,
but imagining a "better" design doesn't help unless it can be run and
produce results, against the fitness bias the consumers of a solution have.
There is nothing wrong with basing an implementation on previous
experience and foresight, but there are many things which are more
complex than what we can readily understand and therefore our foresight
is limited - our implementation experience helps here. This is the age
old debate about waterfall vs iteration - probably another dead end
discussion point.
but we are probably better off using some combination of foresight,
hindsight, and market forces than by excluding any of these or
relying on any of these exclusively.
ack. so as usual, there are no absolutes and a fair amount of subjective
judgement, which I guess is the reason why discussion occurs.