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There‘s a single reason software doesn‘t work like that: Bits don‘t fall apart. If you can have a perfect copy of something you can easily keep it in existenc
by cel1ne 9y ago
There‘s a single reason software doesn‘t work like that:
Bits don‘t fall apart.
If you can have a perfect copy of something you can easily keep it in existence forever.
If not, your artifact will sooner or later decay. It will only prevail through conscious action, being subject to incremental evolution of thought. Which copies are not.
- arbie 9y agoSure, but your ability to run said bits (the scaffolding, if you will humor an architectural analogy) certainly decays over time, whether through hardware incompatibility, software changes, or new abstractions becoming the norm. The result is no different than the code itself decaying.
- cel1ne 9y agoStill, but in practise you can adapt in a mediocre way to new scaffolding by copying large parts. That way you introduce new bugs, which is part the problem we're talking about, but you kept it alive for another couple of years by relatively low effort.