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I guess my response to that would be that any change of platform - like scaling up, replication, etc - is an alteration of the environment, similar to changing

I guess my response to that would be that any change of platform - like scaling up, replication, etc - is an alteration of the environment, similar to changing the geometry of your car's wheels by changing their size, getting different shocks or raising/lowering it. Then you could expect failure states to emerge, but that's when you're looking for unpredictable behavior. I think I was just trying to make the point that in a static system, code you write that works keeps working, whereas mechanical things break down. Emergent problems in mechanical systems come from normal wear, not from scaling.

oriolid 5y ago
Yes. The point is that software is not static. I work on mobile app that doesn't really have the scaling issue, but it's not that uncommon that a new OS update or phone model has new bugs that needs to be worked around or changes some undocumented behavior that the app accidentally depended on. It's not that difficult from mechanical wear. In a previous job in early 2000s they did have some legacy software that was originally written for VAX/VMS and run on an emulator. Even that environment wasn't stable enough so they maintained some real VAX hardware just in case. And as far as I know, the hardware was physically breaking down.