Software vs Religion

Ok, inflammatory title for this post but I listened to a great talking about the science/religion debate and a couple of things really resonated with me.

Web2.0 and Memes

Firstly was the concept of . Memes is ideas in analogy to genes where:-

memes have, as a fundamental property, evolution via natural selection

I Immediately thought Web2.0! I wont try to Define that but one of the things that sites like and do is to catalyse the the evolution of memes, crank up the number of collisions between and tests of ideas. Its happening online right now on and software is making it happen!

Software as Meme

Then I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if we could design elements of software that can self evolve be tested and ‘compete’ to fulfill a role within a process?

‘We need software to be stable’ you say. Thats fair enough but consider this. What if when you built and tested HelpyWidget1.0, everything was fine but now the processing volume has increased, the mid tier server is new, the Database software is new, the new Database forced us to upgrade the client drivers, none of the users ever use the feature xyz anymore but all of them call the software ‘frank’. The environment your code lives in is changing, Code maintenance is boring and expensive. ‘Bring on Evolving software!’ I say.

As a side note, The folks use ‘refactoring’ to adapt to changing environments and requirements and to constantly improve the quality. This is a sensible approach to the same problems…but evolving software is way cooler :)

Intelligent design Is not Necessarily good design

The program talked about the clash between Intelligent Design