03.25.10

Bit rot

Posted in General at 1:10 pm by Steven

I love bit rot. Well, OK, maybe I don’t love that it happens (then again, maybe I do). I guess I love ‘bit rot’. It seems to be a farcical analogy at first glance, but there’s some depth to it, and that somehow adds a certain sort of liveliness to software, in that it’s subject to decay.

For those who aren’t aware of the term, Wikipedia gives a decent definition, in the “Problems with software” section. I might say it this way: if the world around it changes but your code doesn’t, it’s probably rotting. That violates our deepest wish that software could be written once and left to run forever of its own accord, but it’s simply a fact of life, or at least a good way to accumulate billable hours.

1 Comment »

  1. Allanimal said,

    March 25, 2010 at 2:09 pm

    I like to tell the people in production that the program hasn’t changed in x years so when it stops working it isn’t my fault, ask someone else.

    But then again, I don’t do the billable hours thing.

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