The App Compat Guy

Genetic Programming is a fascinating field of study. Essentially, this is the study of software that writes software, selecting the software it has written that exhibits the highest degree of fitness, and allowing this software to continue to evolve over...

In my last entry, I discussed complexity in evolution, and how the most highly complex software is, in fact, the edge case. Far more software is less complex; more people have written a "Hello World" program than have written an application of the complexity...

Webster's Dictionary defines evolution as, "a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state." I really hate pretty much every speech or writing which starts with the dictionary definition of...

The other day, I was working through a problem that a customer was having while using cookieless session state in ASP.NET. This got me thinking about when this is an appropriate approach to take. Many web developers are concerned about their ability...

In my previous posts, I discussed the concepts of non-random selection and arms races. With this understanding in mind, we can start to see a very important concept arise. Accurately defining the unit of selection is absolutely critical to effectively...

Selection is the basis by which evolution can develop the enormously complicated systems that exist today. The underlying principal is non-random selection of random mutations. In any organism, there is some degree of genetic drift. Despite the built...

In my previous posts, I have been arguing the point that throwing away source code and starting over from scratch is a notably bad idea in general. In this, I am echoing what Joel Spolsky says so eloquently in his post Things You Should Never Do . ...

I continue to be surprised by suggestions that an entire body of code - one which has proven its ability to survive in the software ecosystem, should be completely disposed of and replaced with new, less "buggy" code. I read another treatise on this recently...

Have you ever pondered about some really amazing feature of the biological world? The eye? The ear? The sense of touch? Bird flight? These are features evolved very gradually, over many generations. The net result was something that seems incredibly impressive...

From the comments I received, it is apparent that I rushed through my description of mutation, which seems to have led to some confusion. I will attempt to rectify that shortcoming. When I speak of mutation being non-random in biological life, there...

I want to take a moment to go back and review some of the terminology I have been using, to ensure that there is no confusion. The reader will kindly indulge any ambiguity in my language up to this point – I am quite literally making this up as I go along...

In my last entry , I attempted to illustrate (hopefully with some degree of success) the reasoning behind viewing software as an organism, and all of the associated learning we may gain from such a comparison. In this entry, I am hoping to clarify this...

Can we correctly describe software as an organism? I believe that we can make a compelling argument to do exactly that. To achieve this, I first intend to run through analogies that will describe some of the correlations between software and biological...