4 ms·

Comparing DNA to a really horrible code base sounds like the perfect analogy.

• wincy 7y ago
  No dependency too old to be pulled in! If it doesn’t literally kill ya it ships!
  • m0zg 7y ago
    Also copy paste all over the place, bugs and all.
  • nscalf 7y ago
    And often if it just kills you slowly.
  • make3 7y ago
    if it doesn't prevent you from breeding
• marcosdumay 7y ago
  Have you take a look at the building toolset? Javascript is nothing.
• MereInterest 7y ago
  Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1605/ https://xkcd.com/1605/
• hateful 7y ago
  I'm half Italian, so I've already got my share of spaghetti code.
• ken 7y ago
  https://berthub.eu/amazing-dna/ https://berthub.eu/amazing-dna/
  • speleding 7y ago
    Fascinating read! I would love to read an HN discussion of that article with people more knowledgable than me to get a feeling of how accurate it is.
    • ken 7y ago
      It's been posted on here many times, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6909711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6909711 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16233644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16233644.
• otikik 7y ago
  It's at least a couple orders of magnitude more horrible than that. All we have is the binaries. There's no high-level language they can "decompile" into, because the binaries were not compiled from anything. They were literally "grown" from previous binaries by randomness and time. There was no mind guiding the changes so the only way to deduce some design lines is by looking at the system constraints. Nothing makes "sense" besides that. That's how you get, for example, the perception of time subroutine entangled with the vision routine [1] Oh and the hardware is the same deal: we can examine existing working "processors", but each one was "grown", not designed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#Eye_movements_and_%22Chronostasis%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#Eye_movements_...