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danielskatz / software-vs-data

understanding and documenting the differences between software and data in the context of citation
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"Software suffers from a different type of bit rot than data" #12

Closed khinsen closed 7 years ago

khinsen commented 8 years ago

If you want to clear up rather than enhance the confusion between software and data, please don't use the term "bit rot" for anything else than issues related to the durability of physical storage. The term clearly suggests a form of decay in time, which is very different from what happens to software and to data stored in proprietary formats: they become unusable because people change their computing environments.

danielskatz commented 8 years ago

I first heard software bit rot in this context from @jameshowison, so I think the confusion is already there. As I think about it, bit rot might not be the right term, however. Do you have a better suggestion?

khinsen commented 8 years ago

I propose to remove that whole paragraph. It doesn't convey any useful message except to people who believe that there is a universal natural phenomenon called "bit rot".

What this paragraph does address (badly) is the issue of dependencies. But that problem is exactly the same for software and for data, so there is no point in discussing it in the context of differences.

danielskatz commented 8 years ago

As mentioned in #9, I think there is a valuable point here, but perhaps it is just one point, and the two statements should be combined.

mhucka commented 8 years ago

I started writing this comment to agree with the perspective put forward by @khinsen – that "bit rot" is usually intended to refer to data corruption or degradation (i.e., unintentional transformations introduced by hardware or communications events), and that while in a technical sense it can afflict either software or data, this is not the same as problems introduced by changes in software dependencies. Then, at the last moment, I decided to google "bit rot", and discovered that in fact, there's a Wikipedia page about bit rot as software rot! So, it seems this concept seems to be pretty established and probably should be mentioned by name. However, it is essentially the same as problems due to changes in software dependencies, so I also agree with @danielskatz's idea of merging this with the other discussion of dependencies.

khinsen commented 8 years ago

Yes, the term bit rot has found some use in the sense we discuss, but that doesn't mean this is a good habit that we should perpetuate. If you want to solve a problem, or at least draw useful conclusions from its existence, misleading terms are an obstacle. Discussing the problem in the context of dependencies is much more helpful, so I am for that as well.

danielskatz commented 7 years ago

addressed by https://github.com/danielskatz/software-vs-data/commit/c62aed523ccc368d7508d7ea4de012ec2842c0d3