Windows gets a lot of flack for being this monstrous OS that is just constantly being patched and updated with security fixs and feature updates. But maybe this is the natural way of building a rebust and agile system. I come across this reliazation after reading this very good article over at SEED called Algorithmic Inelegance.
In flies, those paradigmatic models of genetics and development, that process of elaboration has been carried to an extreme. Any algorithmic elegance in the ancestral arthropod has been lost in favor of detailed, segment-by-segment hardwiring of the specification of the body plan. If a fly were software, it's software that has been patched and patched, and patches have been put on patches, until almost all vestiges of the original code have been obscured in the tweaks. It's the antithesis of planning and design—it's ad hoc co-option and opportunistic incorporation of chance enhancements. It's evolution.
Does this sound a little familar?
Now I'm not saying that Windows is totally devoid of direction.
Of course some would disagree with that. But the symalarties with evolution is scary.
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