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by pif 656 days ago
Pie cannot be duplicated. Even if you're offering me a worse pie than I ate yesterday, either I enjoy yours or I have no pie.

Software, on the other side, is duplicated on a whim. If you are not offering me new solutions that I need, I'm not even going to bother looking at it.
2 comments
berkes 656 days ago
Not only is it duplicated on a whim, the internet makes discovering it, and getting it, very easy.

So I can not only easily keep getting that one great pie infinitely, I can discover and sample every great pie in the world to find the very best one for me. With actual pie, I'd probably had to travel to Vienna (sachtertore!), or Seattle (apple pie?) to be able to "sample" it.

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manuelmoreale 656 days ago
I’m genuinely confused by your comment. Pies can be duplicated. You just grab the same ingredients and follow the same recipe.

Same thing happens with software. You grab the same libraries and languages and build the same thing.

I think I get what you’re trying to say when it comes to software but sometimes one might switch even if the new software doesn’t offer new solutions.

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raddan 656 days ago
It’s not that pie can’t be duplicated, it’s that there are real costs to the duplication. And making pies precisely the same is surprisingly hard (pie is my favorite treat and I make them all the time).

Not so with software. Duplication and distribution are essentially free. Copies are perfect replicas. Why not then insist on the best version? Also, with food, the varied experience of slightly different pies is fun (“variety is the spice of life”). Unless I expected variation in my software, I would be extremely annoyed that it did not do what I wanted.

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manuelmoreale 656 days ago
Maybe I'm wrong—probably am—but isn't the article talking about something else? He's not talking about making a copy of a piece of software as a perfect replica. I think he's talking about coding something that is not conceptually different from something that was already existing.
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nkrisc 656 days ago
> I’m genuinely confused by your comment. Pies can be duplicated. You just grab the same ingredients and follow the same recipe.

That’s just a different pie made with the same ingredients and recipe, it’s not the same pie I ate yesterday, it’s not a duplicate. I can never have that pie I ate yesterday again.

I can, however, make as many perfect duplicates of software as I want.

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manuelmoreale 656 days ago
> I can, however, make as many perfect duplicates of software as I want.

Absolutely true but the point of the article is not about duplicating software. Is about developing something someone else already developed in a similar way even though the act of doing that doesn't produce something that's "original".

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ClumsyPilot 655 days ago
> a different pie made with the same ingredients and recipe, it’s not the same pie

Pie of Theseus has entered the chat

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Flop7331 655 days ago
I don't understand. The pie worked on my machine.
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Timwi 656 days ago
> I’m genuinely confused by your comment.

I'm not, I get what they're saying. If I want to eat pie, I need to bake one first or find someone to bake it every time. If I want to use a software, I only need to write or find the software once; then I can keep using it indefinitely. Therefore, the common assumption is perfectly justified. Most people who write software do so to create something that isn't already available.

That said, I still agree with the post. Justified or not, the assumption is frequently wrong. Coding is fun for its own sake.

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manuelmoreale 656 days ago
> Most people who write software do so to create something that isn't already available.

Well I guess we must work in a different environment because over my 13 years as a web dev I've seen people trying to reinvent the weel and coding the same thing over and over again. Just think at all infinite JS frameworks.

Are they technically identical? No. Was the problem "solved" already? Probably yes. Was it not solved the exact way the developer wanted? Also probably yes which is why they decided to code something new.

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Dylan16807 656 days ago
They don't consider it technically identical. The design goal was to make something that's significantly better in some way or another. Which is very unlike pie baking.

(I'm sure there's a few frameworks made just for fun/practice but by the time you see it published I'd round that down below 10%)

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