News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:DNA seen through the eyes of a coder by TremendousJudge on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @03:27PM (#29654671)
There are a lot of classical examples of the incoherence of biological systems -- a very common one is some nerves on the neck of giraffes[0]. On this analogy, the most important part is that you're never, ever, in the millions of generations of DNA, allowed to do a rewrite. Only small, incremental changes, each one of them giving the organism more fitness than before. No abstraction can survive this constraint -- a legacy codebase several decades old that's never seen a rewrite is already an unintelligible mess. I think the code analogy holds here.

[0] https://bioone.org/journals/acta-palaeontologica-polonica/vo...

Re:DNA seen through the eyes of a coder by jdsully on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @10:06PM (#29658214)
I've seen a few codebases that are multiple decades old without rewrites. They are understandable and intelligible. Linux is 30 years old as an open source example.