[rumcajz]

I agree that the analogy is fruitful, but you have to look at a big ancient codebase full of spaghetti code, dead code, code that nobody knows about and so on. Parts are in COBOL and assembly, parts are in JavaScript. There are shims on top of shims and a lot of mutually interacting half-assed attempts to rewrite the codebase. With that kind of system you get a glimpse at how a biological system looks like.

[sn9]

It's more like zillions of lines of uncommented assembly written by exponentially more programmers who each try to execute the code against a particularly brutal test harness.