"Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?"
About this Quote
Perlis is smuggling a provocation into a metaphor that sounds almost gentle. Calling software a "soap bubble" doesn’t just suggest fragility; it suggests a kind of designed ephemerality: shimmering, useful in the moment, and not worth preserving once it’s done its brief work. That’s a direct challenge to the engineering instinct to treat code like a bridge or a building, where durability is the moral center of the craft. Perlis, a computer scientist who watched the field race from punch cards to high-level languages, understood how quickly yesterday’s "solid" system becomes today’s constraint.
The intent here is partly tactical. If software is expected to be discarded, you stop pretending you can predict the future with perfect architectures. You optimize for change: modularity, readability, and the capacity to rewrite without mourning. The subtext is a critique of a certain kind of professional vanity - the desire to leave behind monuments in code - and a reminder that software’s real medium is time, not steel.
It also lands as an early warning about the economics of computing. What looks like permanence is often just sunk cost dressed up as principle. Perlis hints that the healthiest relationship to code is non-possessive: build it, learn from it, let it pop. That cynicism is bracing because it’s also liberating; it shifts the goal from immortality to adaptability, which is where software actually earns its keep.
The intent here is partly tactical. If software is expected to be discarded, you stop pretending you can predict the future with perfect architectures. You optimize for change: modularity, readability, and the capacity to rewrite without mourning. The subtext is a critique of a certain kind of professional vanity - the desire to leave behind monuments in code - and a reminder that software’s real medium is time, not steel.
It also lands as an early warning about the economics of computing. What looks like permanence is often just sunk cost dressed up as principle. Perlis hints that the healthiest relationship to code is non-possessive: build it, learn from it, let it pop. That cynicism is bracing because it’s also liberating; it shifts the goal from immortality to adaptability, which is where software actually earns its keep.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coding & Programming |
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