Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Computer science/Archive 4

This is an archive of past discussions on Wikipedia:WikiProject Computer science. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

There's been some recent activity on the Software development article that looks to me like original research. However, I'm not all that familiar with the literature in that area. It would be helpful if other WPCS participants could weigh in on the article talk page. In particular, if you know of any references that support the definition of the term "software development" that the article is currently using, it would be great if you could add them to the article or note them on the talk page. Thanks. --Allan McInnes (talk) 23:49, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

• Web application development and web development could probably alos do with a look. Artw 03:45, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

From my limited knowledge, and based on articles I read a while ago from respectable sources (IEEE Computer Society or one of those many governing organizations and other various online sites), the articles explained that labeling the field in question as "software engineering" is misleading as "engineering" implies concrete laws that have been tested over time and proven; the case is that "software engineering" does not have real laws, merely techniques, and thus correctly be termed "software development," a relatively young academic field. There are debators on both sides of the fence, those who advocate "software engineering" and those for "software development".

I've heard and read that debate a number of times in several different places. It's also given a little coverage in the software engineering article. Part of the problem (IMHO) is that a lot of the people expressing opinions in that debate either don't have experience in software, or don't have experience as engineers. I've seen a number of software people make claims about what "engineering" involves, and how software "development" is different, that seem predicated on some pretty bizarre and idealized notions of what real-world engineering work actually entails (I'm speaking here as someone who has worked as an engineer in the aerospace industry and in the embedded systems industry).

Yes, many people do make many claims based on what they read and heard even though they do not have the practical experience to support their case. I believe we all have this flaw when we are not cautious. This is why I am firm on having reliable, respectable sources. —SolelyFacts

I won't argue that software engineering as currently practiced has a number of problems, and seems to get wrapped up in a lot of things that are considered outside the scope of other engineering disciplines (project management for example - even systems engineering acknowledges PM as a separate, but complementary, discipline, while some people seem to think the software engineering is project management).

That is a very frighting thought: "Some people seem to think the software engineering is project management". I'm wishfully certain people are more intelligent than this. —SolelyFacts

Yeah, my comment was perhaps a little hyperbolic. OTOH, the fact remains that the "software engineering" section of bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble often contains some project management texts, and most every "software engineering" text I've seen contains chapters on project management - something you won't find in other engineering texts (again, even those on things like systems engineering). Even the SWEBOK contains a chapter on "software engineering management". --Allan McInnes (talk) 01:09, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Software certainly presents some unique challenges (but then so does microprocessor design, or spacecraft design, or any other engineering discipline - that's what makes the different discplines... different). But I haven't yet heard anything that convinces me that software can't be engineered.

Science has its limits, but I know of no good reasons or seem any definitive evidence on why it cannot. It will be a marvel of a day when software is engineered. Just imagine all the practical benefits to society. —SolelyFacts

• chuckle* --Allan McInnes (talk) 01:09, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

People like Steve McConnell and David Parnas have made the argument for software engineering far better than I can. --Allan McInnes (talk) 05:39, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

It's curious as to why Steve McConnell titled on of his publication "Software Development." Anyhow, you obliviously know a great deal more than me; I better get to reading. —SolelyFacts

This article might help answer that question. --Allan McInnes (talk) 01:09, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Given that they are virtually the same concept, we should merge or simply combine information from the two article.

I suspect you'll get some strong objections from the editors involved with each article, but it might be worth proposing a merge just to see what happens. --Allan McInnes (talk) 05:39, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

I suppose you see the fine distinction that I cannot. I don't have a strong stance on merging or combining anything (I'm no expert on the field; it was based on few yet persuasive materials I had read in past times). —SolelyFacts

The distinction they appear to be making (and I'm not saying I agree with it) is that software "development" (i.e. developing a software product) encompasses more than just engineering, it also includes things like marketing. It's a matter of definitions rather than distinctions. I've personally rarely seen "software development" used to denote anything other than the stuff that I think of as software engineering. But YMMV. --Allan McInnes (talk) 01:09, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

"If you know of any references that support the definition of the term "software development." I have witnessed many use of the term "software development". I would not know if it was original research. It provides sources and references so I am not one to contend with it; plus one of them is from Cambridge University Press, and another from Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press. The issue, for me, is not with the truth of the definition, as I do not doubt it; the concern is that it is a very narrow, and limited definition from apparently a business POV, and does not encompass the views of others. This particular article should have sections that express the different views across the various areas (business, academic, engineering, etc.).

The article is now much better referenced. User:Oicumayberight and I spent some time digging up various references a week or two back.

Oh, I didn't realize the initial post was more than two weeks ago. The details, the details. —SolelyFacts

I agree it does still have a bit of a business bent though. If you can offer up some more refs with alternative definitions that'd be a big help. --Allan McInnes (talk) 05:39, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

I would be more than glad to do research on the concept of software development; it's a fascinating field. Care to recommend useful portals to begin with, which would lead to reliable sources? Some that you frequent often perhaps? I'd appreciate it. —SolelyFacts

Hmmmm... now that's a harder question than it should be. Steve McConnell's site is probably as good a place to start as any. Roger Pressman's site also includes a wealth of references and links to resources. But I can't think of any I "frequent often", sad to say. --Allan McInnes (talk) 01:09, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I nominated this seemingly no-name article for deletion because it seems suspiciously auto-biographical, but I don't know much about the area he works in. If anyone here knows more about the man or his research, please feel free to comment at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lawrence L. Larmore. --Eliyak T·C 05:04, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Whoops, I messed up I guess. I was following the Larmore AfD debate, and I thought since it was resolved that it was over. Apparently it should still be up on the CS project page? Anyway, sorry for deleting the post. So, what do you do, wait for the original guy to delete his own comment, or what? Tparameter 07:52, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Deleting content from talk pages is generally frowned upon on Wikipedia, unless the content is offensive. --Allan McInnes (talk) 03:54, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

What you do is nothing. The item stays here, and the AfD page records the result of the discussion for posterity (and for the next time someone nominates it for deletion). RossPatterson 04:01, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

[1] didn't help me make a judgement on this subject. Even if he is a bit notable, he's rather boring and dull to read, and I wouldn't keep him as a personal read. No offence, Professor Larmore. —SolelyFacts

I have nominated Forth for FA status. Please participate and help improve the article. --Ideogram 14:05, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Floppy disk is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy (Talk) 22:14, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Beginning cross-post.

See Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team#Stablepedia. If you wish to comment, please comment there. ★TWO YEARS OF MESSEDROCKER★ 03:44, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

End cross-post. Please do not comment more in this section.

Hello. I just discovered this project and was immediately interested. I've been using computers for nearly 25 years, professionally for around 15. I am primarily a network integration specialist and primarily interested in helping with articles related to computer networking (IPv6, IPv4, etc.). I know there are already articles concerning those topics, but it does not appear they are part of this project, or at least they do not appear to be listed in the project's category list. Is that a deliberate exclusion (maybe nobody else in the project is interested?), an oversight, another project that handles that topic, or is there perhaps a history about the topic of which I'm not aware? Thanks. --Willscrlt 08:33, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

I think you may want to look here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Computer networking -- SilverStar★ 09:02, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! That is exactly what I was looking for. :-) --Willscrlt 23:34, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

The article Self (programming language) needs a lot of work. It reads like a tutorial rather than an encyclopedia article, it's overly promotional, and poorly sourced. --EngineerScotty 20:09, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

This is not a dreadful article, but it needs better sourcing. Just adding the new information that is provided in the Talk page would be helpful. EdJohnston

As he said, references could be better. I will add it to my to do list and see if I can get to it sometime. If ya need help referencing, let me know. -- Chrislk02 (Chris Kreider) 17:43, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Central processing unit has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. Sandy (Talk) 23:30, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Hello and best of luck with your project. Looking at the related projects for a place for T-Square (software) and some other early programs, WikiProject Computer science or Early Computers seemed all right. In some cases though, these programs could be "firsts" related to software engineering in general. Is there a WikiProject Software or another spot that would be better? Thank you in advance. --Susanlesch 08:31, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

• I tagged these programs merge. Your advice on whether to proceed with that would be most helpful. Thank you. --Susanlesch 12:18, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

• I will remove the merge tags since there is no support. If you should have comments later feel free to leave them on my talk page. Best wishes. -Susanlesch 05:57, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

The article , Coding conventions, has been prodded. I think it is a notable enough concept so I am going to contest the prod. does anybody wanna do some cleanup or additions to it. If it is felt that this article should still be deleted, Let me know and i will either re-prod it or list it for afd. -- Chrislk02 (Chris Kreider) 13:18, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

• Yes, I agree the article is notable and a good topic. I am not a professional in this area so must defer to the group. I tried to type in a few things but had no time to add sources so did not submit the edit. -Susanlesch 19:40, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
• Also agree. This topic is deceptively deep. Although a newbie, I'll take a crack at starting it. DSParillo 20:31, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
• crack taken. I think this article is OK (for now). Independent review is prob warranted as it's my 2^nd wikipedia article. What is the process for 'closing out' a todo from the CS project? DSParillo 16:41, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 17:44, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

I have made a suggestion to move this project on the WikiProject Directory page from the "Science" section to the "Mathematics" section.

Please read my brief reasoning and direct your comments here.

— Twas Now 06:38, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

I came across Shift Or Algorithm, an awkwardly titled article that was largely a copyvio, and ended up redirecting it to the related bitap algorithm. However, I'm not sure that these are actually the same thing, or that the article should reside at bitap algorithm, which seems to be a less common term. Any comments from the experts? Opabinia regalis 03:46, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Hello - The page Standard test image is being basically destroyed, along with the images, including Lenna. The people involved do not understand test images, they think its a gallery of pictures of pretty girls and animals with questionable copyrights, and needs to be shut down. They are basically deleting the "Standard test template", which spells out the justification for the images to be on Wikipedia. If anyone has an opinion pro or con, please go to the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page and let them know. Thanks PAR 23:25, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

I wonder if someone could take a look at the above. I don't know enough to judge. Is it worthwhile or original research/an advert? Does it need a speedy or AfD? It was linked to Chasm Toolkit the text of which can now be found on User talk:Cwingrav as I deleted it, since it was written in the first person. Thanks. Tyrenius 08:30, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

I didn't spend a lot of time on this, and like Tyrenius I don't know enough to judge; but my first reaction is that it's a suspect but not entirely illegitimate topic. A few comments

1. I did a search on "Concept-Oriented Design" on ACM and found nothing, but then searched "Concept-oriented" and did pick up 14 citations, though it wasn't clear if these articles were related.
2. I did some simple googling and did pick up a number of pages, several were from the same COD webside mentioned in the entry and a few others referred to Chasm.
3. What is most annoying about the article is that it is almost entirely devoted to Chasm.

Hope this helps.A B Carter (talk) 12:53, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Yea, it looks like it is a semiu advert. It am not 100% aware of such an official school of though on design. My first reactions are it is an well written advert. After reading through I am still leaning towards advert. If the article was cleaned up to have no mention of the company or software package at all, i would accept it for the time being. -- Chrislk02 (Chris Kreider) 14:29, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Wow, you all are very into your editing process. I didn't realize Wikipedia was this strict. Good. Now, about Concept-Oriented Design. It is a development process coming out of my research. A paper on the subject can be found here: [2] It was not in the ACM DL as it was in an IEEE workshop at IEEE VR 2005, the premier Virtual Reality conference.

Other papers will be coming, along with my dissertation. This is not an advert, just an entry. There is no company, just a research group and my dissertation. The software package is a development package that is not sold or even in a state where I let others download it without first asking me (it was given to students to evaluate it as part of my dissertation work but that is all). By that definition, let me know if this is a against Wikipedia. By my standards, this is knowledge and not an advert or anything related to a company or profit. User:cwingrav

Ok, now I'm convinced it's an ad, and a likely violation of WP:OR and WP:AUTO. I don't care which process is used to delete it, though I suspect an AfD would work better than a prod, but articles written only by the sole researcher of a subject and based only on the article-writer's research are clearly inappropriate. —David Eppstein 19:24, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

I believe the article qualifies for speedy via 'db-spam'. Only one software program is mentioned. Regardless of the package's availability for sale, the article seems entirely promotional. If the author is willing to make the article more encyclopedic he can always recreate it for a fresh evaluation. The article meets the criterion at WP:CSD#A11, "Pages which exclusively promote a company, product, group or service and which would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become encyclopedic". If instead the article were referred to a full debate at WP:AFD, there would be other concerns raised like notability (WP:N) and WP:NEO, since 'concept-oriented design' seems to be a neologism. We would expect to see third-party printed articles commenting on the importance of Concept-Oriented Design and Chasm. EdJohnston 19:30, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

I have speedy deleted it per discussion above. It would be a good idea to watchlist. Thanks for input. Tyrenius 21:29, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Greetings! I come under the auspices of WikiProject Abandoned Articles, a project aiming to revive interest in articles that have not been edited in a number of years one such article is E (complexity), that is in serious need of expanding. If you could share your time, knowledge and expertise, it would be much appreciated. Lord Pheasant 06:13, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

You say it is in serious need of expanding but there is a complete definition on the page, it's not exactly the kind of thing you can give lots of discourse about? What kind of thing do you think needs adding? I agree it could be made clearer with a simple English definition, for instance I notice the word "exponential" isn't actually used on the page which is pretty weird considering E stands for exponential, but then O(2ⁿ) shows this to anyone who is going to care. MattOates (Ulti) 23:18, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a dictionary. If the E article can't be expanded beyond a basic definition, then it probably shouldn't be an article at all - what little content there is would (IMHO) be better off merged into Complexity class (along with content from any other complexity class articles that aren't likely to ever be more than a definition). --Allan McInnes (talk) 03:34, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Is the definition even correct? Off the top of my head (i.e. I haven't taken the trouble to look this up) I though the definition should be for the class of problems that can be solved in time cⁿ for constant c. That is different from the 2ⁿ described in the article, e.g. 3ⁿ is not O(2ⁿ). Anyway, an appropriate expansion would be to find some complexity-theoretic theorems involving this class and describe them. Or describe a notion of completeness that works for this class (since polynomial reductions don't) and say something about the existence of complete problems. —David Eppstein 01:54, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

If we merged all the complexity definitions into one page it would be a pretty meaty page :/ and quite hard to read. Some example algorithms with E complexity might be the way to go then? MattOates (Ulti) 08:52, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

I have a few examples... The 2000 DIMACS workshop is a more balanced collection, though. I also did a graduate seminar focused mostly on algorithms in E in 2000 that you might find the web pages helpful for. —David Eppstein 16:54, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Category:Claude Shannon, Category:Norbert Wiener are up for deletion at WP:CFD 132.205.44.134 00:45, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I would like to rename the article on A-0 programming language to simply A-0, but I'm not too sure if there is a procedure to follow for this, and I'm not too sure how to execute the renaming without screwing up links. As background, A-0 was not the name of a language but a compiler. There was no language as such, simply a library of subroutines written in machine code along with an ID. Programs could be written by specifying a sequence of subroutines along with a data set and passing the specification to the A-0 compiler. A B Carter (talk) 14:09, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Easiest way is the "move" tab at the top of the page. But "A-0" by itself seems insufficiently descriptive. "A-0 compiler" maybe? —David Eppstein 16:28, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

If you think the renaming is uncontroversial you can just use the "move" tab at the top of the page. This will work unless there is already an article at the destination. After the move, go to the page and click on "What links here" on the left side of the page. This will show you any redirects you have created so that you can fix them. --Ideogram 22:31, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

This article has been nominated for deletion. The people who read this page may want to offer their opinions. DavidCBryant 16:09, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Markup language has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:53, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ubiquitous computing —David Eppstein 02:03, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

I've made an initial attempt to clean up the entry on Short Code. Any comments or suggestions are welcomed. A B Carter (talk) 00:47, 11 March 2007 (UTC)