Re: There are things that don't evolve

Gregory Arago wrote:
...
Therefore, the conclusion that non-natural things don’t evolve, or
rather more specifically, “human-made things don’t evolve” is an
appropriate delimitation to make. Please let me know if those at ASA
would recognize this conclusion as valid (or justified true, in
Plantinga’s words).
...

First thanks for summarizing the thread, I for one found it useful. I
think that possibly on this list it might be possible to restrict
evolution to meaning only natural evolution, however, in the larger
context I think that has become impossible.

Though my undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering, I have
worked in programming since before I graduated, as a co-op student.
Since the early 80s I mainly worked in optimizing compilers, which are
large highly complex programs that translate computer programs into
binary instructions that computers can deal with. While not totally
universal within programming for many of us we explicitly talked about
getting a simple compiler to work end to end as quickly as possible and
then evolving it into the final product. The day "Hello World" worked
from end to end was a major celebration. One group I worked with in
Lexington Ky called it "first breath". Frequently though that event was
months to years before the product could ship. No cases come to mind
where any other procedure was followed that worked. In addition one of
the real problems faced is that unless careful thought is given programs
tend to devolve and wear out. Preventing increasing entropy is extremely
hard especially over many releases and changes in staff. In more than 5
cases that I can remember one of the strong motivators in doing a total
rewrite (order of 40 to 100 person years for highly expensive staff) was
that the compilers had become so old and creaky that finding people
capable of understanding and maintaining them let alone adding new
features was close to impossible. "Write a simple program and evolve it"
was almost a mantra in the industry. I realize this is not evolution in
the sense of the programs changing themselves, however evolution and
increasing entropy were the words used to describe the processes
involved for good or ill.

Dave Wallace
Received on Tue Apr 4 08:06:05 2006