Comment by 015a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 015a | Hacker News Reader

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I think the better metaphor is: Imagine you make a chair over the weekend. You already have many chairs. Chairs are readily and cheaply available. Your design is likely derivative of many other chairs.

Being told any of these things by a friend you show the chair to is entirely pointless and maybe even mean. The only angle that has some level of social acceptability is an angle like "check out this chair that's like what you wanted to build, maybe you could learn something from it", but even that is a 50/50 on whether its taken positively or taken as "oh, you don't think I don't know how to build a chair, wtf bro".

Pie recipes are different. Music is different (VERY different) (incomparable).

I'd say software is more like a pie recipe or a song than like a pie or a chair.

You're comparing completely different products by abstract concepts that are entirely contextual. So the GP is going to be just as "correct" as you. That's the problem with analogies, the more abstract they are, the more people disagree because they perceive them from a different contextual view point.

edited to make the point clearer

And yet we're paid to write derivative songs all day which is why I don't think the analogy fits.

If I write yet another rails app that does nothing to push the industry forward and isn't novel (to a computer scientist) it nonetheless provides business value. And since it isn't consumed on use it's clear that we're talking about a bespoke durable good — a chair, a shelf, a thing that is useful without it being novel.

Software might be made of words but that doesn't make it a recipe or a song.

But in this case, the bespoke rails app does do something that other ones do not, in the sense of it works with a specific database with specific operations.

To stretch the analogy, "this chair fits people who are 180.3cm tall better than any previous chair"

Software is more like the chair design/assembly instructions. It can be trivially replicated an infinite number of times.

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