News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ask HN: can software be made "anti-fragile" (aka "better ... by dragonwriter on Thursday April 25, 2013 @01:53PM (#5608747)
> Just wondering if anyone ever developed some more in-depth thoughts of the possibilities of "anti-fragility by design" in the tech world (specifically software). Not as in "software that lasts a lifetime" (COBOL mainframes anyone?) but building stuff that somehow "gets better".

Software itself might be able to, though I suspect that's a hard problem, in the technical sense. Software considered in conjunction with the social system surrounding it which provides maintenance, etc., certainly can be, but that's a social problem rather than a technical one (and, really, the solutions to it are pretty much the same as making the social system better even if the processes it was managing are not automated.)

Re:Ask HN: can software be made "anti-fragile" (aka "better ... by informatimago on Friday April 26, 2013 @06:14AM (#5612213)
Of course, software itself ought to do it. I don't know if that's a hard problem, but that's a meta-programming problem. Not something you can do easily if you don't use lisp.
Re:Ask HN: can software be made "anti-fragile" (aka "better ... by dragonwriter on Friday April 26, 2013 @10:27AM (#5613077)
> Of course, software itself ought to do it.

Antifragility for most real world software means that the quality has to improve over time even though requirements are changing. Unless the software is adapting itself to new requirements (as well as maintaining itself), that means that the net outcome of development and maintenance efforts has to be an improvement in quality. While the design of the software can be a major factor here (making antifragility easier to achieve or harder), it still depends on the system outside of the software that is developing and maintaining it.

> I don't know if that's a hard problem, but that's a meta-programming problem.

I'd suggest its a problem equivalent to solving strong AI.

> Not something you can do easily if you don't use lisp.

Lisps aren't the only class of languages that support easy metaprogramming, and language support for easy metaprogramming doesn't do much to get you closer to the goal here, anyway.