quote:
Of course, on the software side you can always go back and completely rewrite it, whereas life does not have that option
But only because evolution is true and creationism is false. God wouldn’t have to iterate - God could do a clean-sheet design for every “kind”. If God chose to iterate he’d know exactly what changes he intended to make and perfectly prepare for them. If God chose not to do that, God could refactor to remove all problems. We do not do those things as often as we might wish to because it is impractical for us, even when we’re talking about software.
For small programs it can be easy. For major libraries or big applications it’s not at all. It would take years of effort to replace the software I work on with new feature-complete versions. And that’s years of work that won’t be spent on adding the new features we need.
I encountered Pascal at University (and FORTRAN, and even machine code). My first job was in the defence industry and while I even bought a book on Ada (I thought I might need it) we never used it (though we did use the older Coral 66). In my final project there I learned C - on the job, from an early printing of the 2nd Edition of Kernigan and Ritchie. (In a later job - outside defence - there had been a significant Ada project, but it was never released.).
C is still my main language, though I took a Java course (paid for by the EU) some years back and that’s a significant part of my work.