Post

Lots of ink spilled on "Loop engineering", but no one seems to connect it to its much older name: Cybernetics. Maybe by the year's end, we'll recognize that it was all Control Theory engineering all along.

What makes you think I'm trying to get anyone to learn smth? Or that I'm mocking someone in particular? I was commenting on software eng broadly, which is full of people inventing things that have existed forever, e.g. cybernetics, per OP. The whole field is incurious. We should read more.

0 reposts1 like

Cybernetics is the patron saint of that amnesia, Wiener and Ashby mapped feedback, variety and control in the 1950s and the industry rediscovers it every decade with new nouns. Forgetting isn't accidental, a field that admits its elders can't sell the wheel as new. What else are we renaming now?

The whole data engineering space reinvents databases every decade or so. Feature engineering folks are speed running data engineering right now, rediscovering lambda architectures, derived data, schema evolution rules, logs, etc. Nothing new under the sun.

So my question becomes - how do we encourage advancement instead of simply reinvention? You’re a part of this space, so moving beyond this should be important to you. I’m confused as to why you seem so apathetic and cynical, truly. I’m a cybernetician, so I understand where you’re coming from