The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

by Richard Hamming

You read constantly about “engineering the production of software,” both for the efficiency of production and for the reliability of the product. But you do not expect novelists to “engineer the production of novels.” The question arises: “Is programming closer to novel writing than it is to classical engineering?” I suggest yes! Given the problem of getting a man into outer space, both the Russians and the Americans did it pretty much the same way, all things considered, and allowing for some espionage. They were both limited by the same firm laws of physics. But give two novelists the problem of writing on “the greatness and misery of man,” and you will probably get two very different novels (without saying just how to measure this). Give the same complex problem to two modern programmers and you will, I claim, get two rather different programs. Hence my belief that current programming practice is closer to novel writing than it is to engineering. The novelists are bound only by their imaginations, which is somewhat as the programmers are when they are writing software. Both activities have a large creative component, and while you would like to make programming resemble engineering, it will take a lot of time to get there—and maybe you really, in the long run, do not want to do it! Maybe it just sounds good. You will have to think about it many times in the coming years; you might as well start now and discount propaganda you hear, as well as all the wishful thinking wh...