There is, or used to be, some show on I think the History Channel about how a lot of these processed foods are made. It was fascinating and disgusting in equal measures.
I think the real difference is that in one case you have someone watching a puree of HFCS, artificial thickeners, and almost-real-food slide down an assembly line following directions with little room for personal initiative, and in the other case you have people painstakingly writing code line by line, having to think carefully about each of them. There are a lot of people involved in manufacturing, but there isn't much thought and care compared to individual craftsmanship.
It's much cheaper to manufacture copies of software than it is to manufacture copies of oreos. It might make more sense comparing the individual who painstakingly crafts each line of code to the individual who painstakingly crafts each line of the recipe, the fabrication process, the machines that cook the oreos, and so on.
Re:I am very real
by justincormack on Saturday March 31, 2012 @08:38AM
(#3780174)
Maybe we should sell software at craft fairs? Personalized perhaps...
Someone might rail against "all the preprocessed crap" that you can buy in a grocery store (and people do, all the time), with only the barest awareness that there are people involved in making those products, too. To people who are not software developers and don't know software developers, things like Google Search and Facebook and Microsoft Office might seem like they similarly spring up from within the bowels of huge companies, never really fully owned by any human who touches them, until they are released onto our computers as more cold, inhuman artifacts of the modern world.
Surely we here all know about the people behind the software, but most of us still don't think about the people behind the Oreos.