The Pathetic Fallacy, or, Programming from an Engineering Approach

by [email protected]
Level: Beginner
Oct 05, 2014 at 9 a.m.

This talk posits an understanding of programming as an engineering discipline, one which seeks to resolve certain common questions:

  • is programming a form of mathematics?
  • why does code "rot"?
  • when why do naïve approaches fail?
  • why does code complexity explode with only marginal increases to problem complexity?

It relates this question to the "pathetic fallacy," a literary term that refers to a falseness of pathos, an overly sentimental anthropomorphising of the inanimate, which is argued to be a common explanation for the pathologies that lead to code rot, to the inexplicable failure of the naïve approach, and to explosions in model complexity.


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