In the last blog, I wrote a few things that software is for:
- putting people on the moon
- safely deploying airbags
- making my bank account add up
…
In the last blog, I wrote a few things that software is for:
- putting people on the moon
- safely deploying airbags
- making my bank account add up
…
Once a month or so, this idea comes rambling out of the programming community1:
Software is prose. It is written to communicate ideas to others, it has the interesting side effect that it can be transformed into something a computer can execute.
- Chet Hendrickson
This sounds nice on paper. It makes for a good conference talk about how to structure software, how to design programming languages, and how to collaborate. I agree with what I think is the intent: write software so that other people can understand it and change it as they need to.