Re: [tlug] STM (was: Re: work times & accommodation @tokyo)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Attila Kinali writes:
 > お早う!
 > 
 > ...literally... what are you doing on a sunday morning at 5?

SSHing from California (where it was 2:30 on Saturday afternoon). ;-)

 > Yes, you didn't but the STM community does. 

Well, my response to them is "Go read MM-M 20AEd[1] (the chapters about
silver bullets)."

 > What i was refering to are all the papers and reports by
 > the STM community that show what problems STM has, always
 > ending with "this has to be researched further" but there
 > is no follow up at all..
 > So the problems are known, but nobody adresses them.

Well, I don't know what SP-J is up to now (maybe he's abandoned STM
like a sensible rat leaping from a sinking ship), but the papers at
http://research.microsoft.com/Users/simonpj/papers/stm/ seem to have
an evolutionary flavor to them, and the claims he and co-authors make
for the applicability of the technology seem precise and plausible.

I think you're just mistaking the usual excess of enthusiasm of PhD
students for their creations for something related to reality.
Believe me, these days PhD students are mostly no smarter (in the
senses relevant to doing software engineering well) and typically less
well-grounded in reality than your typical 25-year-old journeyman
hacker.


Footnotes: 
[1]  The Mythical Man-Month, 20th Anniversary Edition.  Reprints "No
Silver Bullet -- Essence and Accident", and adds 3 previously
unpublished retrospective essays criticizing his own work.