Relation To Philosophy and Human Intelligence
This conflict goes much deeper than programming practices, (though it clearly has parallels in software engineering). For philosophical or possibly scientific reasons, some people believe that intelligence is fundamentally rational, and can best be represented by logical systems incorporating truth maintenance. Others believe that intelligence is best implemented as a mass of learned or evolved hacks, not necessarily having internal consistency or any unifying organizational framework.
Ironically, the apparently scruffy philosophy may also turn out to be provably (under typical assumptions) optimal for many applications. Intelligence is often seen as a form of search, and as such not believed to be perfectly solvable in a reasonable amount of time (see also NP and Simple Heuristics, commonsense reasoning, memetics, reactive planning).
It is an open question whether human intelligence is inherently scruffy or neat. Some claim that the question itself is unimportant: the famous neat John McCarthy has said publicly he has no interest in how human intelligence works, while famous scruffy Rodney Brooks is openly obsessed with creating humanoid intelligence. (See Subsumption architecture, Cog project (Brooks 2001)).
Read more about this topic: Neats Vs. Scruffies
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