Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Leibniz, Locke and Wittgenstein: Rationalism versus Empiricism and the Language Game Synthesis

FSE2016 Panel: The State of Software Engineering Research
Prem 3 Lines of Research - Leibniz, Locke, Wittgenstein

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE_jX92jJr8&feature=youtu.be&t=4
28:00-34:00
Rationalism epitomized by Gottfried Leibniz
We locate defects by proving a program can fail

Empiricism epitomized by John Locke
We locate defects by finding patterns of human error

Synthesis
Empirical evaluation of static versus dynamic typing
Cost-effectiveness of dynamic analysis (fault localization)
Ordering static analysis warnings by Naturalness
Exploring statistical language models for type inference

Wittgenstein might question semantics. What is a defect? A server? etc. Raises question of the language game. A language game recognizes zones of agreement.

Prior mentions include Goguen, Zave, Osterweil, Shaw, Garlan, Fielding, Taylor, Medvidovic, Qualitative work

Daniel Jackson, The "broken" concepts & rules of Git, Daniel Jackson 2016
The conceptual blending of "developer" and "operator" in DevOps
The architecture of IoT
Formulations of Security Agents, Policies, Principles

Are We Neglecting our Concepts?
Empirical and Formal are OK
"Language Game" areas: Architecture, Requirements, Process? Not so much.
Two risks: Fixations on tired old ideas, and missing out on radical new innovations

References:
Joseph Goguen
The Denial of Error, Softrware Development and Reality Construction, pp 193-202
Four Pieces on Error, Truth and Reality, 1990  accessible at https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/files/3412/PRG89.pdf
Value-Driven Design with Algebraic Semotics, draft book with Fox Harrell, 2006, accessible at https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~goguen/courses/271/book/uibko.pdf

Pamela Zave,
The operational versus the conventional approach to software development, CACM, Feb 1984, Vol 27 Iss 2, pp 104-118
Four dark corners of requirements engineering, Jan 1997,  ACM TOSEM vol 6 iss 1, pp 1-30

Leon Osterweil
Software Processes are Software Too, from Engineering of Software: The continuing contributions of Leon J Osterweil, ed Tarr, Wolf, pp 323-344, ICSE9, ICSE97 Proceedings of the 19th pp 540-548


No comments:

Post a Comment