Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Software Evolution and Darwin

Author:Ralph Hempel
Posted:5/3/2000; 8:19:13 AM
Topic:Software Evolution and Darwin
Msg #:16919
Prev/Next:16918 / 16920

It's not a new topic, or even a very original thought, but I think it's important enough to discuss again.

It's the idea that cathedrals and bazaars maight be appropriate metaphors for writing software, but Darwin's survival of the fittest controls what we see as software consumers.

Todays bit in Scripting news that asks "What If Microsoft had truly been innovative?" sent me off on this tangent. I think that Microsoft evolved according to its own place in the food chain - it was as innovative as it needed to be to survive where Ashton-Tate, Borland, and others failed.

In the early days of CP/M and the AppleII we had basic ASCII text documents. Memory was scarce, we wanted formatting, so proprietary file formats evolved. Companies merged, formats died out, and indiscriminate cross-breeding produced some questionable offspring. Some companies did little experiments on isolated islands, producing things like OS/2 and the PS/2.

Processors, memory, disk space, and software got bigger, consumed more resources, demanded more intricate support, and eventually reached an unmanageable size. The Internet sprung up out of the undergrowth - invisible to the more dominant life forms. Basic phone access was still slow, so the genesis was in simple, ASCII-based HTML text. This was a necessity which drove the design. There was a golden age of the Internet. Before Flash, before animated GIFs, before Frames! The age of content.

Now that the digital data pipeline is bigger, more data can be spewed out from the servers, and even HTML has evolved to embrace all kinds of extra appendages and frills that attract easily, but do not, in the end provide any real benefit to either end of a transaction.

Where will it all lead? Back to a point where users demand content. To a point where ideas, not just data can be easily exchanged. To a point where the tools exist not on the user's desktop, but everywhere. To a point where the computer on my desk is the portal I use to read, interpret, and feedback ideas. To a point where I can use any computer, anywhere to do the same thing.

This started off as a small thought about the current state of software from the point of view of the consumer.....now it's almost a manifesto for where I want to go today.

Cheers, Ralph Hempel - P.Eng

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