Software Development and the False Promise of Science
Richard Marmorstein on software developers and their lack of citing good sources:
You have opinions – strong opinions – on questions such as “do microservices encourage modular code design?” and “should software projects stick to a ‘novelty budget’?” and “should composition be preferred to inheritance?”. But are your opinions backed by peer-reviewed analyses of hypotheses subjected to statistical tests of empirical data? Not really. Your view that software projects should stick to a ‘novelty budget’, for instance, is backed by your experience reading about this idea in some rando’s blog post and the argument seeming plausible in light of the recent bankruptcy of your friend’s web startup built on WebAssembly, CockroachDB, Elixir and Unikernels.
Richard Marmorstein (13 October 2019)