Q: If a posting of a theory lacks an attempt at falsification, can it yet have scientific elements ?

A: Yes, of course, falsification alone does not define the scientific method. Arguably merely posting an opinion/theory online itself has scientific elements: it’s available for criticism.

So I can’t claim that because you didn’t explicitly include attempts at falsification that your posting totally lacks scientific qualities or only has religious qualities.

It was a leap of faith.

There’s a lot of debate in the programming community and by the above reasoning even if much of this debate lacks attempts at falsification then that doesn’t mean it must be utterly non-scientific. And yet in spite of all of this debate the programming community is still very religious.

Debating the topic of religious thinking in programming may aid in reducing such thinking (*) but I think much more helpful would be to change the nature of the debate: to introduce more scientific elements than are typically present already.

It’s not enough, IMHO, to use scientific methods in your private discussions; that will help your refine your theories but if your don’t publish your methods along with your results you cannot help propagate such methods into the community.

Science is at root an epistemological method, the results of science (such as whether or not programmers think religiously) pale into insignificance compared with this.

Best wishes,
Stacy.

(*) I’m making a small leap here too: Your theorizing about religious thinking in programming indicates you oppose such thinking.

Then Stacy would be right. I don’t refute this point. To suggest that what I said is not founded on application of the Scientific Method is itself a leap of faith. It’s simply ill-founded. There is the assumption that everything I say on this blog is an opinion that I am prepared to either support as I say it, or support it when questioned on the blog - I simply don’t have the time or patience to do that and I much prefer resolving a point of contention in person. I think is far more efficient. You could consider my blog posts a snapshot in time as I derive some position, which is of course, subject to change.

I find Stacy’s inadvertent leap of faith kind of amusing

@where I said “Java is founded on a delusion”, I really mean, “Java’s success is founded on a delusion”.

Then say what you mean, because those two statements can be interpreted very differently.

It’s good that you acknowledge your point-of-view has evolved over time. However, I think Stacy is saying that in your blog entry you didn’t really enrich your argument with multiple angles. The story you painted was black and white. The world is more interesting in color. Come to that, Pirsig’s quote stands out as not being analyzed but just being dropped in as a punchline. In context, as part of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, people might see that quote very differently. Pirsig doesn’t really follow a scientific method of any sort, does he?

Either we have different sample sets of which to extrapolate the set of “most programmers” or one of us has made a mistake. The metaphorical religious “knife in the back” is exactly how I observe programming.

So here is my punchline…

However I almost never see people taking their own pet theories and then trying to falsify them, instead people usually spend all their efforts to justify their own theories and to falsify others. Like religious believers they shelter their pet theories from a reality of potentially falsifying data: they hold their theories religiously. If you want to hold your theories / opinions non-religiously then try to falsify them, the truth does not need your belief or protection.

So here’s my punchline: You haven’t attempted, thus far, to falsify your theory at all, and so I believe you have not employed science but instead religious methods.

If people please read it in the context it was written in, you’d notice that my quotes were an intentional exact reverse of Ricky’s statements. I thought he was way off, and wanted to see what it would look like if I turned everything around. I think my version looks better than his version
The whole “religious” aspect to this story is kind of not applicable. I, and others, are not “Java zealots” with closed mindsets that can’t see anything beyond Java. We’re not some sort of out-of-school visual basic people. Many of us have been coding for a very long time, and we have a *lot* to offer. We like Java’s productivity, it works well in team settings, and it comes with a very rich API set and tons of libraries to choose from. Ofcourse, there’ll be resistance if someone wants to wipe that all off the table…

Anyway, all in good fun. There’re lots of things to do and learn, and I look forward to exploring the new language concepts and ideas. Groovy looks interesting. Javascript does not anymore to me. Just my opinions…

Cheerio!

Java doesn’t reimplemented threading… it hasn’t used user threads (or “green” threads) since version 1.2 or thereabouts.

It’s interesting that you think user space threads are a bad idea because that’s exactly what Erlang and Haskell use, and they are widely considered to be amongst the best languages for doing concurrent work in. I’m of the opinion that Java should revert to some kind of hybrid user threading and system threading model, similar to Erlang.

However, the threading model is really not that important. What makes Java worse than Erlang and Haskell is its outdated lock-based model for sharing data between threads. However it does at least have a proper memory model, which is what makes it better than C and C++.