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// had no concept of "abstraction", adherence to standards or even a logical, coherent design. I see your point. But I would like to make a counterargument. I
by tw600040 5y ago
// had no concept of "abstraction", adherence to standards or even a logical, coherent design.
I see your point. But I would like to make a counterargument.
If you consider the time scale with which biological systems have to work, you probably won't call their design illogical or incoherent. Computer programs have been around for not even a century. Billion years is a whole different ballgame. Can anyone even imagine writing a computer program with any guarantee that it would be readable by someone 1000 years from now? We have a tough time figuring out what our our own code does a few months after writing them.
And wrt fault tolerance, resilience, I don't know, the design language of nature definitely seems far more evolved..
- regularfry 5y agoYour retinas are mounted back to front, and as a result will fall off if they're knocked too hard. Nature works on a "just good enough" principle, in general.
- TremendousJudge 5y agoThere are a lot of classical examples of the incoherence of biological systems -- a very common one is some nerves on the neck of giraffes[0]. On this analogy, the most important part is that you're never, ever, in the millions of generations of DNA, allowed to do a rewrite. Only small, incremental changes, each one of them giving the organism more fitness than before. No abstraction can survive this constraint -- a legacy codebase several decades old that's never seen a rewrite is already an unintelligible mess. I think the code analogy holds here. [0] https://bioone.org/journals/acta-palaeontologica-polonica/volume-57/issue-2/app.2011.0019/A-Monument-of-Inefficiency--The-Presumed-Course-of-the/10.4202/app.2011.0019.full https://bioone.org/journals/acta-palaeontologica-polonica/vo...
- jdsully 5y agoI've seen a few codebases that are multiple decades old without rewrites. They are understandable and intelligible. Linux is 30 years old as an open source example.