On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 10:07:11AM -0700, Albert Skye wrote:
> > order is unnatural
>
> The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution
> by Stuart A. Kauffman
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Order-Self-Organization-Selection-Evolution/dp/0195079515
order is unnatural for things lacking a conscience or a soul (in french,
non animated; I don't know if the sense is correct in english). Entropy.
For human societies, the less organized they are, the less human
they are---the ones with the less conscience are the ones who kill, who
steal, who stock exchange and so on. Do you want to live in Somalia,
in the City, etc.?
When it is forbidden to forbid, egoism rules, hence non-egoists die.
Without a conscience, you don't know that you are and can be a part of
the whole; a part of an organized whole. Nobody knows everything
by his own genius, but because there are things he inherited from the
previous ones; and he can go farther, by taking over (the relay). Not by
sitting on the bleachers with two pounds of pop-corn.
In software, when there is no more someone who understands the whole and
is able to keep the whole as an entity, pieces start being taken apart,
because savages want to put a graffiti on the building; the same way a
dog urinate on things that emerge to tell: "it's mine".
Back to software: how many developers are we _really_ relying upon the
work? For myself, if I count the original ones (Unix/C, Plan9, TeX and
al., CERL GRASS [ancestor of KerGIS]), this is less than 20... for something
like a bit more than half a century of "computer science"... And for each
piece of software I really use, there were a maximum of 3 core people
involved, with one leading.
And to "maintain" this, some claim there are "communities" with
hundreds, if not thousands of "developers"---when for the huge majority,
it will be enough to call them programmers.
And there is even "software creationism": the thing exists, not when
there is working code, but as soon as you have written that it will be
delivered under the holy licence.
I'm getting old...
--
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
http://www.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C
