On Fri Mar 24 17:47:04 2006, Keith Moore wrote:
I think that Dave's message reflects a common frustration in IETF
that
we talk a lot about particular problems and never seem to do
anything
about them. When people express that frustration, they often seem
to
think that the solution to this frustration is to do something
rather
than just talk about it. In other words, they prefer
experimentation
to analysis. I share the frustration, but have some doubts about
the
solution.
What you're saying, I've also heard people complain about in reverse.
In other words, there are working groups where a substantial number
of people involved in the discussion are not only not going to be
implementing the proposals, but don't actually do any kind of
implementation within the "sphere" - we're talking about people
discussing the precise semantics of some HTTP extension who aren't
involved in doing any webserver related programming, or some people
discussing an email issue who limit their interaction with email to
having an email address.
Or, if you prefer, people are talking and not doing the "running
code" bit.
What really bothers me is the apparent popularity of a mindset, in a
group of people that claims to be doing engineering, that we
should just try something without really thinking about it, and
without
a good way to evaluate the experiment objectively.
Now, wait - I agree up to a point.
Yes, we need to carefully analyze what we're doing, because
experimentation won't easily show if a proposed solution will
actually scale to the level we need, is secure enough, and is
flexible enough to cope with future demands that we've not thought
of. This much is, hopefully, not up for debate.
But there's a really simple experiment that's easy to do, and results
in a useful, concrete result. The hypothesis to test is "does it
actually work", the experiment is "suck it and see", and the result
is, one hopes, "yeah, I did this", with an optional "but this bit was
tricky" that we can feed back into the design process.
Unless that experiment is done, we aren't engineers, we're
philosophers.
The fundamental assumption of engineering is that you can make
better
(more effective, reliable, and cost-effective) solutions to
problems if
you (a) first understand what problem you are trying to solve, and
(b)
analyze your proposed solutions (and choose and/or refine them
based on
analysis) before building them.
We're lucky, because we work in computers, so we can actually make a
distinction between "building" and "deploying". Exchanging the word
"building" in this portion of your message for "deploying" makes me
happier with what it says. Changing "analyze" for "building", and I'm
in agreement.
Dave.
--
You see things; and you say "Why?"
But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
- George Bernard Shaw
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