Re: Pizza Example

In message <RGicc.3033$nu2.65_at_newssvr31.news.prodigy.com>, Eric Kaun <ekaun_at_yahoo.com> writes
>I'm not asking for proof, since such is very difficult and expensive to
>acquire, but my experience suggests the opposite. The more "natural"
>approach of XML leads to chaos - data out of sync with no constraints to
>tell you, difficult debugging before you realize the Doc1 node 3 levels deep
>is out of sync with the top-level node of Doc2 in a different place, etc. I
>see absolutely no reason to use the natural structure of language for
>anything other than communicating with business people. Logic and
>mathematics are the basis of most works of engineering, and yet most
>laypeople don't understand them. I would prefer that people building medical
>instruments and weapon systems NOT use language that I'm capable of
>understanding in their designs - that would make me immediately suspicious
>that they're making it simpler than is feasible for good design.

Somebody gave me a wonderful quote recently. "Logic and mathematics give you a consistent model. Academicians have an unfortunate tendency to confuse consistency with truth."

As for you being worried if you could understand engineers or doctors - I'm sorry, but I don't see why I should assume that other people are better than me. If I can't understand (at least superficially) what they're doing, then I conclude they are either crap at explaining themselves or, worse, they don't understand themselves. And I'm sorry if I'm cynical, but I've had enough experience of various professions (and from my own research) to know that people are very good seeing what they want, and not seeing what they don't want. I don't trust "experts". Far too many of them wear blinkers :-(

Cheers,
Wol

-- 
Anthony W. Youngman - wol at thewolery dot demon dot co dot uk
HEX wondered how much he should tell the Wizards. He felt it would not be a
good idea to burden them with too much input. Hex always thought of his reports
as Lies-to-People.
The Science of Discworld : (c) Terry Pratchett 1999