Programming Is Social Learning

SoftwareAsCapital : An Economic Perspective on Software Engineering by HowardBaetjer? ISBN 0818677791

This book describes economics as a social learning activity and applies this perspective to software development. What does it mean for something to be a "social learning activity"? I don't really know, but try to apply this definition and report on how it changes things for you- Social learning takes place when two or more people in a team learn something. How would you act if you were trying to maximize the number of interesting things learned and known by two people on your team?

Let me pretend to be an economist again. My feeling is that social learning is not about individuals learning things. The market "learns" about the possible risks and benefits of owning a particular stock. This "knowledge" is represented as a single fixed-point value -- the price of the stock. You as an indivdual may have no idea that an Acme widgets got some good ratings in WashingtonWidgetReview?, but "the market" knows.

So I am not certain that this particular interpretation helps answer the question IsExtremeProgrammingWacko. Programming, to me, seems to be a process of relatively explicit learning, as opposed to the implicit learning of the marketplace.

-- BillTrost

Programming is for sure a much different kind of learning than the "learning" of the marketplace. E.g., in programming, you have a very complex structure (the program) as the expressed result of your social learning, while in the market, you just have a one-dimensional structure (the price) as the result of the learning. In fact, I would hesitate to use the term "learning" for the process of forming market prices, because the influence of the changes on the "behaviour" of the market is not very long-lasting, in contrast to what one would expect if "learning" took place. -- ChristianLemburg

CategoryBook