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The analogy is a poor one though. This is nothing like rotting. A rotting thing changes, whereas here software stays the same but the environment around it chan
by theaeolist 8y ago
The analogy is a poor one though. This is nothing like rotting. A rotting thing changes, whereas here software stays the same but the environment around it changes. I know, no analogy is perfect, but this analogy is downright misleading.
- ycnewbienomore 8y agoIt’s a good analogy.
- mraler 8y agoI'm trying to think of a better analogy. At first I thought of stagnation, like how a river that gets blocked and can't flow gets filled up with algae and gunk. But then what you said about software staying the same while the environment changes around it immediately made me think of evolution, Like any species that can't keep up with changes in it's environment, software that is not continuously updated to fit it's. What do you think?
- TeMPOraL 8y agoI think the term of art for this model is "Red Queen's race" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race. IMO again, this apply only along the social dimension of software. I can still boot up my decade-old computer and use decade-old software to do useful work (hell, many if not most factories do that all the time). I can be screwed over if I go on-line - either by getting pwnd, or by letting the OS update itself - but as long as I stay away from the Internet, the machine will keep working, and so will the software. (Then again, 'smilliken turned out to be talking about much larger timescales - not decades, but centuries. There, no software artifact will survive, only its mathematical essence.)