Software Is Evil

Important note for the casual by-dropper: this pages quotes its opening sentence way out of context, moves straight to tongue in cheek, and from there who knows where it is busy wandering. So double-check your irony-o-meter while reading!

If I saw "SoftwareIsEvil" signed AlistairCockburn (substitute your favorite Wikist), I'd have to stop and think hard about my prejudices.

"Software Is Evil" -- AlistairCockburn (...now, after thinking hard about your prejudices, please do write and tell us what you found) :-)

I have seen the light! Thank you, thank you, Alistair! I am resigning my tainted employment post-haste, and shall retreat to subsistence farming my 1/3 acre.

Aaah... but I did that a couple of years ago. I now live, subsistence farming my 1.7 hectares (4 acres for the metric-impaired). But somewhere along the way I discovered that SoftwareIsArt, and I now love designing/writing software more than I ever did.

Gee, that was easy; maybe we could start a long-distance social restructuring and reemployment program here :-). Just send in a sentence, we'll send back an arbitrary answer sentence with the trailer "...now, after thinking hard about your prejudices, please do write and tell us what you found," and then the person will glimpse nirvana and commend to others! Seed the process with any number of premier-membership early converts. Stay true to wiki and not charge money, or start a fee-based wiki site... (For those tuning in late, this is obviously all tongue in cheek, I just wanted to get it off the main-line pages.)

Actually, what I learn from the above is that one really can start from any arbitrary sentence and end up somewhere interesting. From tongue-in-cheek, we can get to seeing a software-enabled evil. JensColdewey's signature line is from HermannHesse, "If you talk about it, even the most simple thing becomes complex and incomprehensible." -- cheers, and merry Christmas (or whatever your favorite December celebration is) -- AlistairCockburn

Software doesn't kill people. PeopleKillSoftware?. -- RonJeffries

The evil thing about software and computers, for that matter, is that they do not contribute enduring value. The software doesn't work pretty soon, and even if it does the computer is replaced by the latest, fastest, greatest new hardware and then the software doesn't work anymore. It's really hard these days to read those 8" floppies and those old Bernoulli drives.

That's hardware, not software

Software is very transient. It will be interesting when we start packaging enduring value into our software and hardware. -- RaySchneider

Software doesn't have any enduring value, but to say it can't contribute any is a different matter.

If you still have the computer with the 8" Drive, you can probably still read it. If that computer has a serial port, you can then transfer it to your new 2GHz Computer! The software will probably execute in a blink of an eye!

Hmmm. Enduring value. You mean like the movie Psycho? or a Kit Kat candy bar? Or a warm shower? Or the pyramids? My neighbor is still running the original Mac from 1983 or something. She uses it to keep her family tree. 15 years seems pretty good to me. Longer than my Kit Kat or my last warm shower, not to mention sex. Not as long as some of those old the computer programs they wrote in the early 1960s and still haven't converted to run on an IBM 360. I'm almost inclined to turn it around and suggest that more evil comes from things that endure. -- AlistairCockburn