exfed

On top of that, if anything, forcing the government to fix it's bad code (insert snarky ambiguity between software code and legal code) can't be a bad thing. I'd buy the guy a beer.

This kind of thing makes me question how tightly we couple (or fail to couple) the "code of Law" to the "code of Computers".

Well, to be fair, that romantic image plays pretty strongly on a desire to see my work as something of a legacy--something that outlives my own mortality. I might be unique in that romantic desire, but somehow I doubt it.

Your engineering manager is on to something. I feel like that romantic desire, ironically, gets in the way of making real progress 99% of the time; even the code I'm really proud of, given enough time, will probably end up irrelevant, if only because I'll have learned so much more in all that time. It's easy to think of the act of writing as the hardest part of "writing code." But, really, it's all the learning in all the years prior that's most difficult. So, really, "throwing away" code and starting over isn't actually all that costly. Throwing away engineers, their experience, or skills is what gets expensive.

With that said, one of these days I'll start writing my "The Art of Computer Programming" ...

This is actually a huge problem for the US honey industry right now. As bee kills become more of an issue, re-queening becomes more necessary, which puts even more pressure on breeding programs, which likely only exacerbates the genetic diversity problem.

> Also remember that the honeybee is not native to North America and is technically an invasive species here.

Yes, but they are also the only species (so far) that is commercially managed, and therefore easily counted and tracked. If Apis Mellifera is suffering, we can pretty safely assume that other, native species are also suffering.

I think the take-away is that the Web (with a capital W), even though it's what all the cool kids are doing these days, is really just a collection of real actual standards established by real actual standards bodies, run by real actual Engineers. There are plenty of folks out there who don't give the Web much credence, and would rather shout at those kids to just get off their lawn.

Maybe I'm over-stating the value, but it's good to remember that, as software and automation becomes more ubiquitous, good standards and good engineering are going to get more and more important.