[openrisk]

Software is a cultural artifact. It reflects the society and economy that produces it, just as much as music, literature, urban design, or cuisine.

So you cannot "destroy" software. But you can have fast food versus slow food, you can have walkable cities or cars-only cities, you can have literate or illiterate society etc. Different cultures imply and create different lifestyles, initially subjective choices, but ultimately objectively different quality of life.

The author argues for a different software culture. For this to happen you need to create a viable "sub-culture" first, one that thrives because it acrues advantage to its practitioners. Accretion of further followers is then rapid.

[nirui]

Agreed with most part about cultural artifact, but some food is scientifically proven unhealthy, and there are unsafe way to create software. So maybe there are statically measurable way to create better software instead of just cave in to the trend.

[openrisk]

There is a certain amount of "convergence" of good practices thats happening despite the exhausting trend following. E.g. people happily(?) wrote c++ code for decades but today there is strong pressure from the success of ecosystems like rust and python. Open source accelerates that competitive evolution as it improves transparency and lowers the threshold for adoption.