It’s said that maths is not so much invented as it is discovered. I think the same thing could be said for most software. Sometimes a design is clear to everyone. You just need to “talk through” to the discovery.
@lmika That invention .. discovered thing .. I floated out my thinking a couple o’ years ago .. if interested ..
substack.philpin.com/p/did-we-…
Spoiler alert .. without further context the answer is both.
@JohnPhilpin That’s a good post. And a good way of thinking about invention verses discovery. Makes me wonder whether software design could be mapped to such a spectrum. At this stage, or in the particular domains of design I deal with, I’m not sure that it does. But perhaps it could, and we simply lack the invention of thought that maths is blessed with. Maybe in a couple of millenia.
@lmika i don’t see it .. but most definitely not a coder .. but it seems to me that code comprises a series of specialist languages that can be used to describe various scenarios. The languages get increasingly limited the more analogue the use case in the world that it is trying to reflect. ❓
@JohnPhilpin Maybe in the specialist fields, but in the day-to-day system engineering, you’re mainly thinking of how systems interact, the flow of information, where and how it’s stored, etc. Maths notation is used, but mainly as a description of concepts, such as describing how things are calculated (a user’s usage is “sigma Rt Vd” where Rt is a resource and Vd is how many bytes, etc.). On the whole, it’s probably closer to how maths is used in physics rather than the pure displines.