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Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development
book

Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development

by Scott L. Bain
February 2008
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
448 pages
9h 46m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development

Appendix C. The Principle of the Useful Illusion

My View

Scott Bain

Computers cannot add.

This is not a flippant or cleverly misleading statement. It is a plain fact. Computers, regardless of all outward appearances, cannot add two numbers together and determine their sum. Computers do not know what numbers are, or what adding is, or anything else for that matter. They certainly cannot add.

Clearly they appear to do so—routinely and constantly and without fail. That computers appear to add numbers together, and yet they do not, is an example of what I call the principle of the useful illusion.

To understand the importance of this, we must first come to agree that computers cannot, in fact, add.

Computers cannot add in the same sense that hammers ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780321553720Purchase book