[Marxism] Reification and the multitude in software engineering

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

This modern use of the concept of reification may be of interest to list
members:

"Software engineers with a database background are accustomed to treating
customers, products and other business concepts as data objects. From a
data-oriented perspective, a key task of business systems analysis is to
divide up "customer-space" and "product-space" into fixed, predictable,
discrete units of customer and product. Customer and product information can
then be captured as a set of data records, each representing a fixed set of
facts about a specific customer or product.

But from a business perspective, this can be a gross simplification.
Customer relationship management is a (collaborative) process of relating to
the customer; product management is a process of developing products.
Business management often needs much more flexible, fluid, complex notions
of customer and product.

The object-oriented way of describing the world is extremely useful,
especially for designing and managing components.  It is also useful for
describing the behaviour of components, and their performance in complex
environments.  There are excellent techniques for creating objects out of
processes, out of relationships, or perhaps even out of nothing.
Philosophers and software engineers have a word for this; they call it
reification.

When relationships are regarded as things, this usually focuses attention
either on the bridging mechanism, or on a static snapshot of the
relationship, as for example represented by a legal contract.  When
processes or services are regarded as things, this usually focuses attention
on the deliverable or end-result.

But there are limitations to an object-oriented view of systems and
components. Sometimes we need the reverse procedure - to understand things
as dynamic clusters of activities and relationships.  We call this
ratification."

Complete text at
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~rxv/infomgt/reification.htm



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