alt Hacker NewsThere's no system the same way there's no Facebook, just some databases and servers. Or there's no Java language, it's all just UTF-8 characters. Or there's no government, there's just people voting for other people. Or there's no society, it's all just fancy apes existing and making decisions.
It's quite frankly ludicrous to be a software engineer and pretend systems don't arise from "individual" "independent" elements.
Replies
rayiner • last Tuesday at 7:03 PM
As a former engineer, I would say a “system” is designed as a whole, like all of the things you mentioned (but unlike society). If we are talking about the interactions between separately designed things—e.g. various autonomous vehicles designed by different companies—then we’d talk about “emergent behaviors,” not “systems.”
> Or there's no Java language, it's all just UTF-8 characters.
Some programming languages explicitly require UTF-8 in the language specification. Java is not one of them.