Programming metaphors (Was: Programming as literature.)

[Terry Reedy]

"Jarno J Virtanen" <jajvirta at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote in message

> When I think of the final products of software development and
building
> construction I find it hard to compare them.  Yeah, sure there is
some
> sort of an "architecture" that they're based on and they're both
> non-trivial combinations of some sort of building blocks.  But it's
just
> that the software product seems so fragile.  There are of course
methods
> and ways to build high quality software, but no matter how
protectively
> it is built, there's always the chance that some part of the
software
> fails which makes the service provided by the software unusable.

Fragility results from lack of redundancy.  We can understand speech
with noise and prose with typos (which were more common when
everything was written by hand) because normal language is about 50%
redundant.  Its the original error-correcting code.  Engineered
structures are commonly engineered to be at least 50% redundant (ie,
have a safety factor of 2 or more).

Terry J. Reedy