Software from a biological perspective:
We already have viruses as a metaphor for self-replicating malicious programs.
I need to go back to biology 101 to get some of the terms.
It’s becoming much more complicated to understand the lower levels of what is going on in a program at this point. We are building with Legos in the form of libraries, but they, like the bricks work well if you follow the instructions, but if building something custom there are often hard edges/corners or mismatched colors. It is also biased toward building up.
Working on the biological metaphor helps with the comfort or discomfort of not understanding things below some level. The base pairs may be associated with assembly instructions?
We still run into the same problem as we do in the building metaphor. There are a million ways to do the same thing. This is found at the organism level. We have boards cut from different species, but we can trust that when we get fir 2 x 4s that they will work as well (within whatever tolerance) as fir 2 x 4s from a different source. Once we can more standardize the bricks, then maybe the metaphor will apply better. We are at the mud level. We can build amazing things, but most of us are knee deep catching crawfish and noticing the increase of clay kilns.
I guess the web garden metaphor has been around for a long time, but I don’t hear much about it anymore. With machine learning we start to have access to farm machinery. Maybe the biological correlation appeals to me because I want to put in the initial effort to then watch something flourish and bring joy and resources. With static building, the best we can hope for is that it will continue to maintain its integrity.
