4 thoughts on “Legendary Productivity And The Fear Of Modern Programming | TechCrunch”
The greatest programming minds are capable of using software to multiply massive integers that are bigger than the universe.
You don’t need to be a great programming mind to do that. I’d argue that any programmer incapable of writing software to do maths on arbitrarily large numbers isn’t competent.
I think this complexity causes by fragmentation is a sign that software is becoming less like man-made infrastructure and more like an ecosystem of competing genomes.
Maybe in the future, expertise in software will be more similar to the feild of medicine than a feild of engineering, as software systems will be so complex that there will be no hope of fully understanding how they work in detail. Experts will instead have to rely on a detailed understanding of the high-level behavior that emerges from the interactions of billions of cells and proteins, where cells are programs and proteins are protocols.
Ramin Honary it already is in practice in a lot of cases IME. Systems are said to have grown “organically” which always seems to mean “without any real direction and nobody knows exactly how they work”.
The main system I maintain and develop at the moment is like this. Not only is its behaviour often unpredictable and mysterious, it has vestigial organs that you still can’t snip out without being an expert surgeon or it will kill the host.
John Hardy Developer 
The greatest programming minds are capable of using software to multiply massive integers that are bigger than the universe.
You don’t need to be a great programming mind to do that. I’d argue that any programmer incapable of writing software to do maths on arbitrarily large numbers isn’t competent.
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I think this complexity causes by fragmentation is a sign that software is becoming less like man-made infrastructure and more like an ecosystem of competing genomes.
Maybe in the future, expertise in software will be more similar to the feild of medicine than a feild of engineering, as software systems will be so complex that there will be no hope of fully understanding how they work in detail. Experts will instead have to rely on a detailed understanding of the high-level behavior that emerges from the interactions of billions of cells and proteins, where cells are programs and proteins are protocols.
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God Emperor Lionel Lauer I cringed when I read that. I’m not entirely sure what it even means. Once I got past that it was an OK article though.
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Ramin Honary it already is in practice in a lot of cases IME. Systems are said to have grown “organically” which always seems to mean “without any real direction and nobody knows exactly how they work”.
The main system I maintain and develop at the moment is like this. Not only is its behaviour often unpredictable and mysterious, it has vestigial organs that you still can’t snip out without being an expert surgeon or it will kill the host.
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