Software As Rock Climbing

The thing that makes software not quite like art, poetry or theatre, is that if you don't get it right, in art, you still have art (put extra carriage returns into a paragraph and call it a poem). There is a binary quality to software, a go/no-go quality, that puts it more in the civil engineering category - lots of slapdash programs actually do run, but there is a point before which it simply fails to run or to compute acceptable answers. But there is much more exploration of moment-to-moment unknowns in software than in civil engineering. There is a cooperativeness to it, also, that puts it more like chamber music or jazz. When I synthesize these, I find I increasingly use the metaphor of rock climbing to describe how SoftwareDevelopmentAsaCooperativeGame, the cooperative game that is a group of people working together to get a quasi-understood idea to show up as a running piece of software. Rock climbing shows up for me, because there is this pre-strategizing, there is this moment-by-moment exploration, there is this mutual dependency, and if you goof, you fall. The team makes it to the top, or not.... and often, would rather keep climbing than reach the top and have to stop. --AlistairCockburn

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