
The Evolution of Software 15
An anonymous reader writes "Russian physicists Gorshenev and Pis'mak have posted a preprint claiming evidence that software projects naturally attain a state of self-organized criticality, in a process analogous to the contested theory of punctuated equilibrium in biological evolution (see also this paper by Bak and Boettcher). The software projects studied are FreeBSD, Mozilla, and GNU Emacs, by analyzing data from their CVS checkins."
Huh? (Score:2, Funny)
Huh?
To reiterate...
WTF?
Re:Huh? (Score:1)
Must be a Windows user...
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
So.... (Score:2)
Clearly they've never looked at the code I have to maintain!
Not a large stretch of the imagination (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not a large stretch of the imagination (Score:3, Funny)
I've spent every minute of available free time for the past two months hacking on my project. I've finally uploaded libfu-3.2.7 final. My eyes don't focus, my girlfriend left me, and my cat stopped leaving dead mice in my slippers. So for the next two months I'm not touching any code.
That's why you get punctuated equilibrium.
Re:Not a large stretch of the imagination (Score:3, Funny)
hmm... (Score:1)
It's time to qualitize our paradigms for increased marketplace productivity and to keep employee morale high by constant restructuring and
or.. to quote Dilbert, My SPOO has too much FLEEM
Did anyone understand this post?
Biologically massive software development (Score:2, Informative)
Mob Software: The Erotic Life of Code [dreamsongs.com]
An Essay in First Person by
Richard P. Gabriel & Ron Goldman
It has been previously discussed in Slashdot [slashdot.org].
Correction (Score:5, Funny)
Russian physicists Gorshenev and Pis'mak...
Gorshenev is a Russian, but I'm pretty sure Pis'mak is a Vulcan.
Stating the obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
Well if that wasn't the most complicated summary of the software development process, I don't know what is.
Yes there are a lot of changes initially, since the product is being written, then as it reaches alpha the features taper off (thus the
Re:Stating the obvious (Score:1)
That's kind of like wishing that dogs are pink with flat snouts and make grunting noises.
Restating the obvious (Score:1)
Like animals, software tends to change a lot until it becomes pretty good, and then not change as much any more.
Not Stating the obvious (Score:1)
In software terms, what this means is not that code gets more