Creationist software engineering? A frightening possibility!

The willful irrationality of the Bush administration both started in
lower level technical fields where technicians under pressure have
evolved demotic forms of resistance including Fundamentalism, and is
re-infecting software development in the USA.

Evidence has long been the decline in cs enrollments and the resulting
need to hire "programmers" from other fields without anything more than
training with such a heavy ideological component, biased in all cases
towards free market needs that these "programmers" can't code.

But the latest shred of evidence is most disturbing.

expressexec.com publishes a series of short books on management topics
most of which are well written and useful. But comes now a book,
"Complexity and Paradox" by a certain Doctor "Jim" Underwood of Irving
Texas.

And in this little old book, Jimbo attacks evolution as only a theory
and on this attack makes a case for a visionary leader as opposed to
bottom-up, self-organizing teams for handling complex
problems...despite the fact that we've long known in software that
top-down management, ESPECIALLY of the visionary nut case variety, is a
disaster in software!

Make no mistake. This book is a MANAGEMENT book and American books on
MANAGEMENT have always been carefully vetted and edited to reflect
mainstream views including respect for science. I've never seen an
attack on a central paradigm so necessary to the existence of modern
biology in this genre and a responsible editor would have shitcanned
this book as being lunatic fringe ten years ago.

Yet, it reflects a secret rage of many American software managers. The
Fundamentalist G-d built earth in seven days as a series of
disconnected objects without internal structure and without
"inheritance".

This is what many American software managers want, and they have long
been impatient with factoring above and beyond "what the user wants".
They long resisted the Algol paradigm of block structure which permits
a mere employee to subgoal.

But far before Bush, it was noted in a Scientific American article
around 1980 that there was a real contradiction in regions including
Texas between science and technology in that the lower-level
"technicians" did not share the world-view of the university
scientists.

The university scientists even in Texas (including UT Austin professor
of computer science Edsger Dijkstra) subscribed to "European"
skepticism, a skepticism which through Kant was seen to generate
knowledge at the limit and which is very different from demotic
American skeptical philosophies, all too often a high-class variant of
peasant suspicion. Because of the Kantian twist, the skepticism
necessarily included forms of belief such as evolution because Kant had
in fact justified belief as at the ground necessary for coherent action
including communicative action.

Evolution, like structured programming and OOP, is not a "theory" or if
it is, it is transcendant and it organizes the business of biology. In
attacks on evolution, I hear in fact the American engineering manager
at the Morton Thiokol videoconference which slaughtered the crew of
Challenger telling good engineers to "think like a manager and not an
engineer".

Modern society teaches the obedient and frightened to think without
structure: to deal with constructed concepts as *sui generis* as did
Noah when old Noah, in the organizing legend, manage in record time to
find all phyla and load them in a series without structure on board the
Ark.

The problem in American society today is that literal believers in this
Biblical paradigm of an engineering effort are now responsible for vast
DNA data bases which affect people's lives, and they have been taught
by a convergence of time-pressured management needs and Fundamentalism
into a reified and unstructured form of thinking about that which in
fact has deep structure...such as what my (Douay Catholic) bible
identifies as traffic in Babylon: "the souls of men".

Fundamentalism converges with management in being able to justify
massive injustice.

The technical class, seizing upon and implementing the results of
natural science in ways that for first entrants made money, did so in
part by shutting down the critical spirit while at the same time
retaining necessarily Enlightenment forms of skepticism universal in
America, an Enlightenment society from day one.

But the technical class was always, perhaps beginning with General
Leslie Groves' suspicion of Dr. Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, impatient
with the Enlightenment penumbra of ideation which was the environment
in which the first movers of 20th century science, from Einstein to
Turing, has existed.

Bush represents their apotheosis and triumph for he has seized the
controls of the most advanced and Enlightenment state IN THE NAME OF a
post-enlightenment rejection of uncomfortable and non-reassuring
truths, including the physical (as in physics) unwinnability of any
nuclear war, the Turing narrative of the limits of computation, and the
fact that software takes time and is best written by self-managed
Enlightenment subjects and NOT Aarons and Jacobs who walk in fear of a
self-appointed Moses...who Dr. "Jim" Underwood apparently feels is best
able to deal with a mystified complexity and paradox.

The software crisis is exclusively an American phenomenon which I see
recurring in China precisely to the extent that Chinese companies
import American management methods. It's an American denial of
evolution, for if man did not descend from the ape, then it's a WASTE
OF TIME to derive a business rules engine from a mere compiler: to the
anti-evolutionary mind, the two entities are of different status in a
half-remembered mediaeval Great Chain of Being.

The "software crisis" caused by the growth of an OFFICIALLY SANCTIONED
irrationality in American business in which today a railroad company
executive is Treasury Secretary and in which this choo-choo Charley
lectures China on its "need" to revalue the renmimbi based EXCLUSIVELY
on American needs.

Programmers need at some risk to insist that software takes time and is
best written by free men and women, who are Enlightened subjects and
not "programming resources" or a desert tribe to be led by a patriarch.

Software evolves as sure as man descended from the apes in a way that
glorifies God.

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