From: utzoo!decvax!watmath!jcwinterton
Newsgroups: net.followup
Title: Re: Dr. D., math, etc.
Article-I.D.: watmath.2387
Posted: Wed May 12 12:40:44 1982
Received: Thu May 13 03:42:23 1982
References: ihuxn.121

	Well!  Considering the mail I got, I feel that clarification is
necessary.  I do not believe that math consists only of Combinatorics
and Optimization (counting and doing it well).  Mathematical thought is
so close to philosophical thought that they become hard to separate especially
when logic is involved.
	The word "algorithm" is tossed around with great glee by many people,
but only mathematicians, programmers and philosophers seem to use it in
its exact sense of "a method of doing something".  You will notice that
in the last sentence I differentiate between mathematicians and programmers.
I do believe that programming is somewhat mathematical, but I do not
believe that all mathematicians are programmers.  My general approach
to learning computer languages and writing analyzers for some of the
small ones I have been involved with has been formal of late, but when
I started out brute force was used.  (It turns out that I actually discovered
recursive descent parsing on my own.)
	WRT DJ Molny, software creation is not engineering either.  In fact,
it is multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary.  Like the "real" engineering
crowd a hundred years ago, we are at the threshold of defining either a
scientific art or an artistic science, where the mechanical is the result
of the creative and esthetic.  If programming were a science, there would
be only one way to program something, and the methods would produce
repeatable results every time.  Clearly this is nonesense.
	What this discipline needs is the "one machine architecture" which
would then make it unnecessary to worry about efficient code generators for
it would happen once and for all time.  Similarly, if there were only
one machine, we would only need one machine-oriented language.  Under those
rather stifling conditions, programming could become a science?
John Winterton.