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by iandanforth
5044 days ago
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The quest for perfection may be futile. DNA is also code, and it's full of bugs. That code lives for hundred of thousands of years, if not millions. Biological processes offer the suggestion that your system can be functional in the face of constant failures and random variations in behavior. Biology can even offer a very high reliability rate. While we get sick all the time, and people are born with all sorts of genetically disadvantageous traits, many key processes are mind-bogglingly reliable. (No sight v No sense of touch: Compare the rates of blindness to the rates of congenital analgesia type 2) While the math behind CS offers tantalizing guarantees of reliability the reality of software development and developers deliver a reliability far lower. I think it is a fascinating thought experiment to imagine a development process where instead of writing any code, all you're writing is tests (or feature descriptions) and let the code adapt to the environment you've defined. |
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Agreed, and I think it's easy to observe that fact with nothing more than your DNA example. In biology, perfection will always be outcompeted by "good enough."