Dear John, (01)
I have never, and I've written several in my early career, seen a manual for a
nontrivial device, piece of software, or schema, written and designed by an
engineering team, that adequately specifies the form and behavior of the team's
product and been able to adequately track that system's refinement and further
development. (02)
Such manuals must be automatically generated from the implementation language
(not comments therein) and compared to the expectations set upon them. Only
then can you be sure of conformance. (03)
I'll accept interoperability only if it comes with certain guarantees, to whit:
all interoperation must meet the requirements of a Turing oracle: i.e., be,
effectively, a well-defined side-effect free function-call with no dependency
upon how the result is computed, nor dependent upon any prior or subsequent use
of this oracle or any other. The oracle is not required to provide a guarantee
of return, nor meet any realtime or security constraint, since these rightly
belong in the hands of the caller. Offers made by an oracle may, of course,
have their own constraints. Caveat emptor. (04)
No omniscient dictator is required for what I propose since I merely propose
that the foundations of an industry be constructed, upon which it can build
well-engineered little kingdoms. Today the industry is only the first little
piggy. (05)
If what you say is true, then we can never "do it right." (06)
The industry has a fiduciary responsibility to the public and its clients to do
it right. Given the ever growing dependency that the public has upon the
systems that the industry builds for its well being, and if the industry wishes
to avoid eventual regulation of the kind that the pharmaceutical industry
enjoys with the FDA, then we are well served to consider the matter sooner
rather than later. (07)
In short, a little of the wealth that has been generated must be plowed back
into the land. (08)
Regards,
Steven (09)
--
Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering
http://iase.info (010)
On Feb 16, 2013, at 1:54 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: (011)
> SEZ
>> ... the assurance that in writing an application the program and any data
>> representation will be translated correctly to the machine; not only in the
>> first instance but on any machine for which it may be translated in the
>future...
>
> That is a normative constraint. I agree that it is necessary to
> guarantee that a particular implementation does exactly what the
> the manual says it does.
>
> SEZ
>> I am against diversity, heterogeneity, and interoperability if it means
>> - as excuse - that things get to stay as they are.
>
> Unless the world is taken over by an omniscient dictator who asserts
> all the specifications and micromanages every implementation, we will
> always have diversity and heterogeneity. I recommend that we design
> our systems to support interoperability with systems we can't control.
>
> But we can still make sure our own systems conform to the manual. (012)
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