Copernician Revolution

Software is a young discipline. It is still in its infancy. Following the old Haeckelian idea, it has to retrace the history of its species, and thus yet to meet the two last revolutions which human thought has undergone: a Copernician, and a post-modern one. From its current perspective, they are maybe not so clear to tell apart.

The Copernician revolution is the rise of generic (aka. universal) laws, over the specific ones while ruled the Aristotelian world. In physics, this took place with the adoption of mathematics as the language of Nature. Sure, mathematics existed and were important before. But they were only one domain of thought.

This role is now imparted to software, in all the domains of development of technology, but especially in SCM. Software is thus not anymore just a domain of application of CM, but both the language in which the other domains are to be represented, and the tools with which complexity may be handled.

Now, in the last 400 years, the Copernician revolution (giving way to modern thought) has gone far and deep ahead, and hit the limits of its own implicit assumptions, leading to the (rampant over the last century or so) next, post-modern, revolution. What has dissolved there is the concept of a universal Nature which could be examined from external points of view. As a result of our own successes, we are now able to look at ourselves as part of what we observe (or rather forced to take into consideration the alterations our mere observation bring to what we look at).

The problem with this, and where it applies to software and to SCM, is that it results in resonance effects which break reality into an effectively discontinuous map of paradigms. Within the domain of excellence of our tools, we find ourselves isolated from others, using concepts which are irrelevant to them, and thus unable to communicate. Somehow and paradoxically, we are back into specificity.

Who is we? Well also the proponents of traditional CM who deny the existence of realms in which their processes do not apply (or badly break down, add to the complexity instead of help to solve it), and thus do not recognize that they too, sit in a niche of their own.

-- MarcGirod - 20 Jun 2009