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by rbrogan
3843 days ago
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The best part of the article is the concrete image of the milk cartons. On first seeing the image, your mind is going to tend to think things ought to be one way. Then it comes out and says, "No, it is the opposite." That creates a bit of cognitive dissonance and makes one ask: "Wait, why?" This is good as far as software goes, because it is so abstract that often the brain is not fully engaged when talking about it. It is too easy to know something in the abstract, but then not know it enough to apply it in the concrete. |
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To see how software is like milk, you have to compare writing custom software for each and every client vs. writing one product and deploying this same program to all clients.
The analogy of mass production for software is when the same operating system runs on millions of machines.
However, the author of the article suggest that the equivalent of mass production is when a piece of software takes on a lot of responsibility, and gets bloated with features. But that's a totally different issue. When you compare ten cartons of 1 pint milk vs one carton of 10 pints, then you are dealing with indistinguishable ten cartons.
If you want a real world metaphor that's like software complexity, you could rather use recipes. Elaborate, complex recipes don't scale; just like software. There it's not trivial to put the non-indistinguishable ingredients together. With milk, it's just pour all the milk in one big container. There is no additional thinking required.
TL;DR author compares apples and oranges.