River Engineers · Sun Jul 18, 12:36 PM

Unfortunately, I have no record of the source for this quotation. If you know, please tell me!

River engineers are engineers who do their jobs by trying to model small parts of rivers in idealized miniaturized laboratory mockups, by building control structures, and by repairing them when they inevitably fail. This is not the picture we are accustomed to for other engineers.
The river is human nature and human failings, and it runs through software as it does nowhere else in human endeavors. The salt sweet tears, the edgy new love affair, the first birth, the exhaustion falling on exhilaration, frustration and anger, the kicked heart of rejection, and all the world of life finds its way into the lines of code, the designs, the architectures and frameworks we find essential to running our system of life in the political and economic world. We cannot test the river, we cannot model it, we cannot understand even the smallest part of it to the level of science in high school chemistry. And because the river and the warming and cooling of the earth cannot be figured, because the man and woman and the loving and hating cannot be figured, some engineers can only build, hope, and in the end, repair.

-- David Pickett --

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