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Subject:RE: Anthropomorphism is bad because... From:"Bob Colwell" <bob -dot- colwell -at- comcast -dot- net> To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Fri, 18 Jun 2010 17:59:16 -0700
Actually, engineers love to think in analogies, and human-derived analogies
come to mind most readily.
As a grad student in 1984, I saw the famous CS professor Edsger Dijsktra
give a talk at Carnegie Mellon, in which he opined that computer designers
and programmers were going to destroy their own effectiveness if they
insisted on using anthropomorphisms. Dijsktra's point was that using
analogies to illuminate functional relationships was far inferior to using
formalisms that could be proven correct. He believed ever-growing system
complexity would eventually exceed our ability to understand our designs in
these informal ways.
After hearing that talk I was depressed for a couple of days, because a) he
was very famous and everyone said he was smart, and b) he was telling me I
had no future in the design community. But then I brightened up -- he was
restricting his attention to existing ideas and systems, and was giving no
hint as to what to do to fill a blank sheet of paper with a new design.
That's actually the same problem mathematics has everywhere -- it's one
thing to work through a proof to see if it's correct, but it's a much harder
thing to start from scratch.
After lo these 26 years I now think he had a point (formally prove whatever
you can, because our systems need all the help they can get) but he also was
missing the point, that human creativity cannot be reduced to a mathematical
algorithm.
-BobC
Ps. I'll go back to lurking again; I'm a design engineer not a tech writer,
but this community was helpful to me when I was writing a book a few years
ago and, well, you're just an interesting bunch of folks!
2010/6/18 McLauchlan, Kevin <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>:
> I gather a little anthropomorphic fun/laxity is permissible in your
> techwriting milieu?
I've never heard it questioned, though that "little voice in your head"
does ring some bells. But before we examine the position that
anthropomorphism (or perhaps it's just metaphor) is bad, it might be
good to see who (if anyone) actually holds such a position.
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