Why Does Software Rot?

By "forgetfulness", I also mean the stubborn clinging to the old ways, because reasons. The necessary dying of the old guard, a la Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

But I also mean that each new cohort apparently needs to rediscover the deep truths (first principles) for themselves, to earn the wisdom vs blindly accepting received knowledge. I have no idea why this seems to be the case.

  When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could 
  hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 
  twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned 
  in seven years.

    -- Mark Twain (disputed)

Maybe what I'm advocating is the Socratic Method. Versus telling people "just because".

Thank you.

Well, that's true. I think we might need to distinguish between what ideas are lost or are not what a new group is clinging to. Often comes with new people, young or old, coming into an organization. Maybe also distinguish between "current thoughts on what's best method" vs "known methods along with their benefits and problems."

"Maybe what I'm advocating is the Socratic Method. Versus telling people "just because"."

Well, there's how we publish the knowledge and how they learn it. I'm for traditional reporting with empirical focus, less silos, easier search, and easier distribution. Far as learning, Socratic Method is one among many methods that might have potential. It's too big a topic for me outside brief work I did on using various parts of brain simultaneously to increase recall, incremental problem solving of increasing complexity, matching training to realistic scenarios, and side-projects that are open-ended to match fun & curiosity. Don't think I did anything else in research on the topic. Well, a M.C. test generator and some expert system prototypes but they were crap honestly. :)

«It is not as obvious that software is also a set of assertions about the world - and it's not as easy to determine which assertions about the world the software depends on.»

I like that definition: "Software is a set of assertions about the world". It may be less obvious than an Encyclopedia, but again, perhaps that only makes it a better analogy.

«An encyclopedia is a static list of supposed facts and its change is somewhat predictable by in terms of how our understanding of the world changes.»

Ah. This is where Wikipedia actually strengthens the analogy. An Encyclopedia has always been loosely hyperlinked with cross-references. Entire complex webs of assumptions and assertions about the state of the world. Refactors of Encyclopedia content always could have interesting complex relationships with other content.

Certainly there is an extent to which Encyclopedias are known to predictably change: new elected officials each cycle, for example. But there is still plenty of unpredictable changes: new red letter days in history, new evolutionary scientific shifts in consensus, new lenses in which a culture views itself.

An example of the lattermost, in that yellowed 70s Encyclopedia you could still spot fragments in the process of being excised of what we now consider to be racist views of culture and cultural history. That among other things was a source of fascination to this teen in the 90s.

The often unspoken truth is that as much as Encyclopedias try very hard to be objective, they are still a product of their culture. (So too do we often want to think that Software is objective and nothing but mathematical assertions about facts about our world, but here too they are products of our [corporate] cultures and moored in ways both obvious and not obvious to the culture that built them.)

Wikipedia shows us that complexity of Encyclopedias much more directly, but those bones were always there in Encyclopedias even when we couldn't see them. A link to click is much faster than shuffling between volumes of an encyclopedia to follow cross-references, but the cross-references have always been necessary to build up a view of the assertions about the world.

More interestingly, Wikipedia strives to give a better, more transparent view, into the cultural biases of its contents; all of the [citation needed] tags and "More Research Required" templates and Talk pages of endless discussion. The novelty here is that they've opened up all of that to the common user, but the essence of that has always been in Encyclopedias, just locked away by the librarians and researchers in their own notes.