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"The way I see software, it gets better with use. It is not self-healing, but given that somebody is fixing the bugs that are found (which is often the case), t
by akkartik 12y ago
"The way I see software, it gets better with use. It is not self-healing, but given that somebody is fixing the bugs that are found (which is often the case), then software keeps getting better with use."
It's got to be more nuanced than that. For example, software won't benefit from bugs being fixed if the rate of churn is very high, if new features are added rapidly and the size of the state space explodes. Times like that create technical debt. Surely technical debt isn't antifragile. Since we still don't know how to avoid it, it seems a stretch to say all software is antifragile.
- _ikke_ 12y ago> "The counterbalancing force here is the constant flow of new features added. This is the normal state for most successful software - we want it to do more things. So while we gain quality from the bugs fixed, we lose quality when adding all the new features" The next sentences mention that.
- akkartik 12y agoRight. So the headline is like saying, if not for gravity we'd all be flying. Someone's often fixing bugs, but that someone's also adding features. No generalization about all software may be made on this basis.
- webmaven 12y agoAll software is not anti fragile (projects die), but I think the system-of-all-software likely is, in much the same way that modern server clusters are built of individually fallible servers. It would be very difficult to kill Debian, for example, no matter what issues are found in individual packages.